Erasure

5

It was raining when I arrived in Los Angeles. A real Southern California rain, which washed away hillsides and homes, flooded parts of Newport and Long Beach and backed up traffic on every freeway. I found that I was restless during my drive home, not because of the sea of unmoving tail-lights in front of me, and not because of my having two more weeks of the semester left to teach, but because something was gnawing at me. I didn’t know what it was; I had seen or heard something that struck me as wrong. I let it go; what else could I do? I finally made it to Santa Monica and my house, where I brushed my teeth, not so hard, as per instructions of the dentist, through his hygienist, as I never got to see the big man himself, but just hard enough to interrupt the formation of the plaque that was eating me away from the inside, and went to bed. My head on my pillow, I had a dream. First, of my father telling me the stories of how Paul Robeson once broke into song in Miss Madsen’s Tea Room at the beach and how Paul Laurence Dunbar would stroll the pier reciting poetry, and then I was alone on that very pier, younger, but not so young that I was afraid of being alone there so late. The moon was full and bright and there was a corona about it. Way out, under the shine of the moon on the water, I imagined I could see the surface disturbed by a school of bluefish. Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush. “Are you asking for my help?” I asked her, but she just talked on, saying things I didn’t understand, but the quality of them left no question as to her anxiety. “Is it Mother?” I asked, but this too was met with chatter that, as soon as she spoke it, I forgot it. Until she said, “Did you see him?” I stopped her and asked, “See whom?” But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject. Then I awoke.

All propositions are of equal value.

The following morning, after a walk through the large back room that served as my woodshop, I got around to going through my mail and, as I expected, there was a letter from my agent, whom I had for some time been wondering whether to keep, as he seemed painfully, for me at least, resigned to the fact that my work was not commercial enough to make any real money. This was undoubtedly true, but nonetheless it seemed a part of his job to foster some kind of optimistic delusion on my part. Still, he was willing to take my work for what little return he saw. The letter from him was short, merely introducing the letter that had been sent to him, namely a rejection of my latest novel:

Dear Yul,Thanks for letting me to take a look at T. Ellison’s lastest effort. Who am I kidding? Why did you bother sending it to me? It shows a brilliant intellect, certainly. It’s challenging and masterfully written and constructed, but who wants to read this shit? It’s too difficult for the market. But more, who is he writing to? Does the guy live in a cave somewhere? Come on, a novel in which Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics?Thanks again.

All Best,Hockney Hoover

There are times when fishing that I feel like a real detective. I study the water, the lay of the land, seine the streambottom and look at the larvae of aquatic insects. I watch, look for hatches and terrestrial activity. I select my fly, one I’ve tied at streamside, plucking a couple of fibers from my sweater to mix with the dubbing to get just the right color. I present the fly while hiding behind a rock or in tall grass and wait patiently. Then there are times when I wrap pocket lint around a hook, splash it into the water while standing on a fat boulder. Both methods have worked and failed. It’s all up to the trout.

Classes did end as all things must, and right on schedule, and with the welcome news that my promotion to professor had come through. But the news did nothing to erase my depression over the rejection of my novel, now the seventeenth one.

“The line is, you’re not black enough,” my agent said.

“What’s that mean, Yul? How do they even know I’m black? Why does it matter?”

“We’ve been over this before. They know because of the photo on your first book. They know because they’ve seen you. They know because you’re black, for crying out loud.”

“What, do I have to have my characters comb their afros and be called niggers for these people?”

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

I was stunned into silence.

“Look at that Juanita Mae Jenkins book. It’s sold like crazy. The paperback rights went for five hundred thousand.”

In my mind, I had the generous thought, Good for her, but I didn’t mean it. She was a hack. “She’s a hack,” I said. “She’s not even a hack. A hack can actually write a little bit.”

“Yeah, it’s shit. I know that, but it sells. This is a business, Thelonious.”

I didn’t say another word, just set the receiver down in its cradle and stared at the phone.

While I was staring at the phone, it rang again. It was Lorraine and she was very upset.

“Is it my mother?” I asked. “Lorraine.”

“No, it’s Dr. Lisa.”

‘What about Lisa?”

“They shot her.”

“What?”

“Dr. Lisa is dead.”

I put the phone down because I didn’t know what to do. My stomach was cold on the inside. I could feel my heart beating. I struggled to recall my brother’s telephone number and dialed it.

“Bill, I just got a call from Lorraine.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“See you at the house.”

Often, I would simply cut wood. The smell of it, the feel of it, the sound of the saws, manual or power, tearing through it. I would practice bevels with the router, miter cuts, add to my pile of tapered legs. I wanted to turn on the table saw and rip a plank, but I had to drive to the airport. I had to go see what Lorraine had meant when she said that my sister was dead. I had to meet Bill at Mother’s and figure out why Lisa wasn’t there. I’d get on the plane knowing virtually nothing. If the passenger beside me were to ask the purpose of my trip, I’d have to tell him I didn’t know. Perhaps I would say, “Lorraine said they shot my sister” and then the person beside me would know as much as I.

It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention. Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change. Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present. Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning. Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical. Even if the language is unknown. Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content. Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.

A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.

It wasn’t difficult to conclude that Bill was a homosexual, whether it was true or not. He liked being with men in a way different from the way heterosexual men liked being with men. Effeminate behavior, I learned when young, served as no measure of sexual orientation. My gym teacher, whom I imagined eating rail spikes for breakfast, was gay and I knew it not because he held his hands a certain way, not because he made a pass at me, not because he would park himself by the showers and listen to us bathe, but because I saw him late one night walking hand in hand with another man. At first I was shocked, but I caught myself. What I really felt was envy. He seemed so happy, holding his friend’s hand, enjoying the evening. I wanted to hold a hand too, albeit a girl’s hand, but a hand nonetheless.

Bill would date girls, but was cranky the while. I don’t know if Father and Mother ever suspected anything. If they had I’m sure the scene would have been ugly. My parents talked rather badly about the queens that paraded the street near my father’s office, but, more than anything, thinking of sexual preference, or that there was sexual preference, didn’t exist. My father had a term, which I heard once, for a homosexual man and that was Eye. I never did discover how the word came to mean anything.

I was driving up Highway 395 on my way to fish the South Fork of the Kern. At the junction of 178 and 395 I stopped for a bite. It was summer and dusk was coming on and so it was late enough and still eerie enough for the weirdos to be out. I sat in a booth and was called “sugar” by the middle-aged waitress while a couple of guys spoke French to each other in the booth behind me. When traveling, it is best to eat without regard to health or one might not eat at all. I was carving into what was called a chicken fried steak and was unable to detect chicken or steak, but it was clear that it was indeed fried, when a couple of stringy, gimme-capped, inbred bohunks came noisily into the restaurant. Their keen hearing, though it did not allow them to know it was French, picked up the annoying cadence of a “fern” language. They sat at the counter and cast more than a few glances toward the French-speaking men, until they could take it no longer and walked over to them.

“You boys funny?” The skinnier and taller of the two asked.

“Funny?” one of the Frenchmen asked.

“You know, queers,” from the second long-fingernailed, backwoods, walking petri dish.

“Ah, queers,” the Frenchman said. “Oui.”

“Oui,” from bumpkin number one, who looked at his buddy and shared a laugh. “Come on outside so we can kick your ass.”

“I don’t understand,” the second Frenchman said.

Bumpkin two must have stepped or leaned closer. I registered the alarmed expression on the face of the waitress, who then called out that she didn’t want any trouble.

“Outside, faggots. You ain’t chickens, are you? It’s two against two. That’s fair.”

“Actually, it’s two against three,” I said. I put the bite that was on my fork into my mouth.

Bumpkin one stepped over to look at me, then laughed to his pal, “I think we got the nigger riled.”

I chewed my food, trying to remember all the posturing I had learned as an undersized teenager.

“You a faggot, too?” he asked.

I pointed to the fact that I was chewing. This confused him slightly and I could see for a split second his fear. “I might be,” I said.

“So, you want to fight, too.”

I didn’t want to fight, but the fact of the matter was that I was already fighting. I said, and still I am proud of it, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it. Just remember that this is one of the more important decisions you will ever make.”

I’d overshot my mark. His fear grew and turned into rage and he hopped back and yelled for me to get up. I was afraid now that I might really have to do something I didn’t do very well, throw punches. I stood and though I wasn’t a skinny wire, I was not much larger than either of them. The second bumpkin yelled for the gay men to get up, too.

They did and I wished I’d had a camera to capture the expressions of those two provincial slugs. The Frenchmen were huge, six-eight and better, and healthy looking. The rubes stumbled over themselves backing away, then scrambled out of the diner.

I was laughing when the men asked me to join them, not at the spectacle of the rednecks running out, but at my own nerve and audacity, to presume that they needed my help.

C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.

I imagined my sister treating a patient, a little girl with a name my sister despised, looking into her ears, joking with her, asking her if purple was her favorite color because that was the color of her throat. The child laughed and my sister said something stern to the mother, wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. She walked the mother and child down the corridor to the front, where a scared teenager fidgeted in her chair on seeing my sister. The receptionist said something to my sister and handed her a chart. She took the pen from her jacket breast pocket and checked a couple of places, initialed a couple of places. Then the little girl tugged at my sister’s skirt and all sound stopped while my sister offered the child a raised-eyebrows glance. The sound came back. Broken glass, screams, the squawking of chairs against the floor. My sister’s mouth formed words that even my imagination cannot make out and then she was gone.

The police rang the bell of my mother’s house. She thought they had come to read the gas meter. They told her about my sister. The officer, a woman, said, “She was pronounced dead on the scene.”

My mother undid the clasp of her watchband, then fastened it again, then she said, “Thank you for coming to tell me. Would you mind telling Lorraine for me?” She called Lorraine into the room.

Lorraine upon seeing the police was immediately in a panic, her hands starting to shake.

“Lorraine,” Mother said, “these nice people have something to tell you. I’ll be upstairs. It’s time for my nap.”

I took a taxi from National to my mother’s house, stared down at the river as the car crossed the Fourteenth Street bridge. I had vague and unsettling memories of everything that had ever gone wrong when I was a child, times when I accidentally hurt my sister, times when I hurt her on purpose, when some boy had crushed her feelings, when her grades weren’t what she had wanted, Bill ignored her, I ignored her, Mother paid me more attention. I admired her, but hardly knew her and it was all my fault, had to be my fault, because she was not alive to blame. But that thinking was bullshit and I quickly dropped it, replacing it with consideration of my familial duties.

At the house, my brother opened the door to let me in. Our embrace served only to amplify the distance between us, though our grief was very real.

We stepped back and looked at each other.

“How’s Mother?” I asked.

“She’s asleep,” Bill said. “I gave her something. I got here a couple of hours ago. Lorraine’s the one who’s bouncing off the walls. I gave her something, too.”

“Maybe later you can give me something,” I said. “Have you figured out what happened yet?”

“Someone shot into the clinic and killed Lisa,” he said. “I talked to the police thirty minutes ago. A rifle.”

I walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. “Did they catch who did it?” I asked. It felt like a stupid question, a pointless concern. It really didn’t matter. Lisa was dead and nothing would change that. “Do they know why?”

“Some zealot, they think. One of those anti-abortionist idiots.”

“Lisa mentioned that murder in Maryland when I was here,” I said. “Good lord. I can’t believe this. I was halfway expecting Lisa to open the door when I arrived.”

“Me, too.”

“I should go up and see Mother,” I said.

“I guess. She’s pretty out of it. After that, we should go over to Lisa’s and look at her papers, see if she left any instructions.”

Mother was, as Bill had said, out of it. She looked up at me through her haze and wondered aloud if I were my father. “Is that you, Ben?” she asked. “They’ve taken away our little girl.”

“No, Mother, it’s me, Monk. You just rest, okay?” I helped her back down into her pillow. “Get some sleep.”

“My baby is dead,” she said. “My little Lisa is gone.”

Klee: What are you thinking about?Kollwitz: Why is it that bloody-minded men are such prudes? Why are they so hostile to sexuality and images of the body?Klee: You’re referring to mustache boy.Kollwitz: You were lucky to leave when you did. I couldn’t bring myself to abandon my home. But back to the subject. That monster and those like him are as threatened by those silly nymphettes of Mueller as they are by Kirchner.Klee: Ferkel Kunst.Kollwitz: Pardon?Klee: That is what he calls what we do.Kollwitz: I lost my son in the first war and I fear I will lose my grandson in this one. All because of a man who is afraid of his pee-pee.Klee: And other people’s pee-pees.Kollwitz: They’ve established a new bureau. The Commission on the Value of Confiscated Works of Degenerate Art. They’re selling our works to foreigners. They sold them for nothing and burned the rest. I want the ashes of the bonfire to mix with my paints.Klee: That’s a lovely idea.Kollwitz: Imagine the smell of those ashes.Klee: Indeed.

My sister’s apartment was full of life. I never knew her tastes in anything after she became an adult. She liked pastels. She listened to R&B. She enjoyed color photographs of horses and birds. Her bed was neatly made. Her kitchen was clean. Her bathroom smelled sweet. Beside the sink was the ring box I had made for her four years earlier. There was an inlay of wood on the top. I remembered vividly making the box and hoping the while that she would like it as much I enjoyed constructing it. I lifted the lid and looked closely at the spalted maple inlay. It had darkened with age, but was still considerably lighter than the ebony box. There was one ring in the box and I guessed it had been Lisa’s wedding ring.

Lisa wanted to be cremated and that was what we did. We had her body burned and her ashes collected in an urn that we brought home and set on the mantel over the fireplace that was never used. Mother cried. Lorraine cried. Patients and co-workers and colleagues and Lisa’s ex-husband-sans-new-wife all came to a service at the Episcopal church my family never attended and they cried, too. When younger, I despised religion. Later, I didn’t care, viewing the trappings with vague amusement and almost always finding the practitioners somewhat dull of spirit and thought. They said their words to their god and Lorraine, at least, was made to rest somewhat easier. Then we went home and sat at the kitchen table. Bill and I sat at the table, Bill having given Mother and Lorraine little somethings to help them sleep.

Bill asked me if I was still making chairs.

I told him I was. I finally asked him where Sandy and the kids were.

He told me they were in Arizona.

Bill asked if I had a new book coming out soon.

I told him that I was trying to sell one.

He didn’t ask me what it was about.

I asked Bill where his wife and children were.

Bill told me that he admitted to Sandy that he was gay and that she took him to court and took the kids, the house, the money, everything. He told me his practice was failing because everyone now knew he was gay.

I asked how something like that could happen.

He said he lived in Arizona. He said: “Sandy actually deserves everything. I lied to her for fifteen years. I endangered her life, or so she believes. The judge believed her anyway. I’ve confused my children and it will take a while for them to be able to understand what’s happened. If they ever will. I deserve what I got. Which is, basically, nothing. I can’t look my kids in the eye. I owe more money than I make. And I live in Arizona.”

I felt bad for my brother and, truthfully, I was impressed by his understanding response to his wife’s anger and his children’s confusion. But it was sad that the most significant bit of information in his admission of guilt and failure was that he owed more money than he made. Mother needed caring for and I didn’t believe that Bill was up to it. Lorraine was nearly as old as Mother and would perhaps require the same care, as never had I been made aware of any family of her own. The spotlight was falling squarely on me. My skin crawled, my head ached, my neck itched, all as I watched my life as I knew it change before my eyes. While sitting at that kitchen table with Bill, I was already packing up my apartment in Santa Monica.

Poor me! A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own. Giving up life for life, loving as I knew I should, and, perhaps most importantly, attempting to live up to the measure of my sister. Time seemed anything but mine, as if I were sleeping, walking and eating with a stopwatch! In my imagination, I told Mother I’d be back, took a leave from my teaching, put things in storage, packed bags, flew east on an L1011 seated next to a woman my mother’s age, eighty-two, on her way to a rosarian convention in Georgia, moved in with Mother and Lorraine.

I sat in the living room, the air still and overwarm. I’d made myself a pot of tea and was trying to control my anxiety and my imagination. I listened to the sounds of the old house, the house of my childhood, the house where I’d known my sister. Bill was asleep. Mother and Lorraine were long asleep. The house’s creaking found rhythm and I counted the cadence of the groaning, complaints, stiffenings. I considered the possibility that reasoning myself to D.C. and into that house was premature, but I had no success dispelling the thoughts. With the revelation of my brother’s woeful personal circumstances, de jure absenteeism yielded to de facto guilt and so I was as good as there.