The Book of Other People

Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz by Heidi Julavits

On the final dusk of her life, Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sits in a green velvet armchair reading – or rather not reading – a dull nautical mystery called Trouble Astern. Her chair faces a large window overlooking a long driveway lined with oaks. Beyond the furthest oak she can see the ocean and, riding the horizon, a house-lit island.

Behind her is a closed door.

From this vantage point, we cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz. She is blocked from view by her throne-like chair. Glad Parks-Schultz’s name suggests she is as dull as her mystery, an insincerely cheery woman compactly assembled, her bland orb face stacked directly atop her middle like a snowman’s. Her name suggests a curt and stilted manner. We see her barking monotone pleasantries, scaring children unintentionally. There is no sense arguing with this perception, even if there is only a little truth to it. We cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz, we can only hear her name in our heads, and her name has carved a lumpen shape for her there.

Glad Parks-Schultz tries repeatedly to lose herself in her mystery – a love affair, a sailing trip, a cabin, a knife – but cannot. Following the spat over the Christmas ham (‘How can you serve ham?’ her daughter had asked, a fair question; Sylvia was a vegetarian, something her mother had willfully forgotten), Glad Parks-Schultz finds herself in a familiarly pinched humor, her Holidays Gone Wrong mood. To go with this mood she plays in her head images from another Christmas, images from Fanny and Alexander, the only Bergman movie Glad has ever seen, and then only because Sylvia, a film major minoring in psychology and thus a self-appointed Bergman connoisseur, gave it to her as a Christmas present last year (‘This is more your speed,’ Sylvia had said, not uncritically). Fine if it was. Glad preferred her cultural enrichment free of anguish.

Outside her window (in which only she can see her faint reflection), the tree-lined drive extends to a distant point. It is the trick of perspective, thinks Glad Parks-Schultz, whose face, in the half-reflection in this dying-light time of day, appears longer and thinner than it might to anyone actually seeing her. Glad Parks-Schultz splays her book over her lap (only twenty more pages to go), giving up on the cowardly pair of lovers who have sailed and anchored in a cove, who have rowed their dinghy to the secluded beach, who are sneaking through the woods to a cabin to kill the woman’s husband with a knife. Why the husband is alone in the cabin is itself a bunch of self-reflexive foolery – he is a writer putting the final touches on a mystery book. She wants to ask the husband about this book – not the book he’s writing, but the book he’s in. What kind of mystery, she would ask him, makes you wait until the very end for a dead person? She is a district judge. She is not interested in crimes before they happen. She detests the why of most novels, which is the reason she sticks to mysteries. There is no emotional worrying of the why in mysteries – she cheated on him; he wanted her money – there is only the outcome, and the intricately explained how.

Meanwhile, Glad waits impatiently for Sylvia and her college boyfriend, her son Rod and his college girlfriend, all of whom she has banished from her house in a fit of ham pique, to return from the beach.

But once these people (her children and their temporary beloveds) are out of her sight she feels unseen, and not terribly easy as a result of it. Better to be loathed on a major holiday. Better to feel hated and alive. She is a stern district judge despised for her imperviousness to human context, to bad-luck stories. (‘No Glad-Handing Parks-Schultz’.)

The first snowflake of the season tumbles past the window. Glad huffs. She brushes the spine of Trouble Astern and prays for an escape from her tedious self. She’ll take any old diversion from this green velvet armchair – her mother’s favorite armchair, the upholstery warted with burn marks during her mother’s final days smoking in this very chair, dying in this very chair. She wants to be free of this Holiday Gone Wrong mood, this overheated pair of woolly mukluks.

This is where, Glad thinks, if I were, say, a less cooperative character in the relentlessly trouble-free Trouble Astern, I would set the writer-husband’s peg-leg afire (were he to possess a peg-leg), I would crush the whiny lover’s head with a winch handle. If impulsive violence isn’t part of my character, I could instead (as is the annoying tendency of the characters in Trouble Astern) flash backward to some baldly moral exemplar from my childhood. I could allow myself to be sucked backward and molecularly reassembled as a younger, sweeter person, available to be efficiently known by others via some traumatic event involving – preferably – my mother. This is the way of the world, Glad knows. She hears it from the lawyers every week. Mothers are, in some soupy way, to blame for every act of criminality.

Glad rubs at the spine as if it were some tinny magic lamp, promising instantaneous transport to an enthralling past. For the purposes of heightening the intrigue at this particular moment she thinks of this enthralling past as Her Secret Life. Everything has a secret life these days – birds, bees, alphabets, armoires, the characters in Trouble Astern – and Glad feels quite comfortable in claiming one for herself as well, even if she’s not entirely clear on what constitutes a secret exactly. If she’s never spoken of it, is it a secret, even if the content isn’t particularly combustible? After all, it’s not that she failed to tell this ‘secret’ on purpose (to deceive, protect, gain financial or emotional advantage, whatever); really it existed as a part of her past person that was inextricable from her current person, and so to know her was to know this about her.

Or so she’d assumed. During the ham incident, when Sylvia had unfairly accused Glad of not knowing her (didn’t Sylvia know that Glad’s way of knowing was what looked like not knowing?), she had then gone on to say something that was, perhaps, true. She had claimed that Glad refused to be known. I don’t know anything about you, Sylvia said, and I’ve known you for twenty years. I don’t know why you are the way you are.

A person needs a reason to be herself? thought Glad. But instead she said – fair enough. This is her measured, judicially minded parry to every little trauma Sylvia kicks her way. Fair enough.

Glad looks at the falling snowflakes, thicker now, ghosting the branches of the oaks. The green velvet prickles the backs of her arms. She squirms uncomfortably, then settles down to concentrate, closing her eyes and straining her face muscles. Pushing her brain backward is like trying to nag a boulder uphill with a feather. She begins with something easy. Where was she when she heard the explosion? She was hiding from her mother behind one of the oaks lining the drive, fingering the bark as she is now fingering her book. The scientist’s house next door, unseen behind a wall of arbor vitae, emitted a cloud of white smoke. The slate tiles from the garage roof scattered through the air like shot from a rifle, growing larger and larger as they spun towards her. A late-blooming sense of self-preservation drove her behind a tree trunk, into the front of which, a second later, two tiles thunked themselves with the sickening sound of axe-heads. Her mother emerged from the house. She noted her sunflowers, decapitated by a low-flying tile. She spied a speck of Glad’s dress, protruding from behind the impaled oak.

Get in here and finish your chowder, she said angrily. Or did she? Glad honestly couldn’t remember. She was only sure that her mother treated her as if she were to blame for the accident, as if Glad’s availability to be freakishly killed had caused the neighbor’s house to explode.

(She can imagine Sylvia asking at this point: why really did the house explode? And was anybody killed? But this is not the secret. Or rather these questions, the inevitability of Sylvia’s literal-minded questions, discourage her from sharing this secret past of hers. Not to blame Sylvia and her pointless redirects. But to moderately blame Sylvia. Yes, indeed. If Sylvia’s searching for the why, the why Glad is the way she is, why Sylvia has never been permitted to know her in a way that feels satisfactory to her, Sylvia must in part take responsibility.)

But returning to the flashback. Her own mother, Glad remembers, steered her into the house. Glad felt invigorated by proximity to annihilation, her head lighter for having nearly been detached, airborne – and then her mother’s total inability to accurately read Glad’s emotional state made her remember (she actually remembered remembering) an incident with her piano teacher who had quit the previous year.

(Your piano teacher, Sylvia would say skeptically, implying that, after a near-death experience and an explosion, some actual lesson might be extracted.) But soon she was remembering inside of a reminiscence (this was another reason why she’d never revealed her secret life to anyone, such an aimless tributary it was), feeling quite viscerally beneath the hands of her mother the touch of her old piano teacher, Mr Phillips. Something about Mr Phillips’s sleazy availability, especially as he hovered over the keyboard with his chin practically brushing her sort-of breasts as she clunked her way through ‘Greensleeves’, appealed to her. Or not his availability – his stupidity. He was so certain that she was a hapless, naive girl of what – twelve? eleven? – that he could nearly brush her breasts and she wouldn’t notice. That he could caress her elbow as she mutilated ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and she would read his attentions as teacherly.

It was a sweetly vile arrangement, everyone more or less content to behave dishonestly, until Mr Phillips came late one day, so late that Glad convinced herself that he was not coming. And thus she allowed Harold Blunt to kiss her by her back door, the door Mr Phillips used because he was a back-door sort of man. She often kissed Harold Blunt because Harold Blunt was such a far-flung outcast that no one would ever believe him if he claimed to be kissing Glad Parks practically daily. On this day that she was kissing Harold Blunt, Harold Blunt had been chasing her with a water balloon. He cornered her by her back door and, balloon held threateningly over her head, clamped his lips over hers. When Mr Phillips found her kissing Harold Blunt, he stared at her as an adulterer might stare at his cuckolding mistress. She averted her eyes, but even so it was as if every belittling, superior thought she’d ever had about the man was broadcast over the neighborhood loudspeaker. He knew he’d been had. Harold Blunt responded by smashing the water balloon on Glad’s head and running away. Glad stared at Mr Phillips through her raining-down bangs. He hardened to her in a matter of mere seconds; she was no innocent, she was just another ‘Greensleeves’-mangling trollop who’d made a fool of him.

As the balloon water dripped into her eyes, she was reminded (a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence) of another moment in her life, although in fact this moment was in her then-future, so how could she have ‘remembered’ forward from the past? Confusing, and yet this was how it happened, or rather this was how this past of hers existed. As an ever-shifting matrix of falsely interconnected selves. Somehow as a twelve- or eleven-year-old she remembered being sixteen, she remembered riding in the back of a rental car driven by her parents, rain sheeting down the windshield, too much for the the hairpin wipers. Their Bermuda vacation had ‘turned’, as her father phrased it – a hurricane loomed, the three of them had colds, her mother, an incessant liar who lied about things that shouldn’t be lied about, was ‘in her element’, i.e. raucously miserable. When miserable she told stories that Glad herself knew to be untrue because they had happened, or rather hadn’t happened, to her. At this moment she was telling Glad about the time she and Glad had taken the ferry to the Vineyard and Glad had tried to jump overboard. ‘You loved to self-destruct in a crowd,’ her mother said, forgetting that Glad had climbed atop the railing in an attempt to rescue an old lady’s escaped parakeet, clinging to a porthole bolt. She’d lost her footing and slipped safely back to the deck, but not before knocking the parakeet from its perch and sending it hurtling to its death in the wake below. When the old lady approached them worriedly for a report, her mother patted the old lady’s forearm and said, ‘He flew away, dear.’

From that moment on the boat (which was, technically, an anecdote inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence), she recalled a time when, at nine, her mother calmly watched her fall out of an apple tree; at ten, when she ran over a baby vole with her bicycle, and her mother, who was poisoning voles by the thousands in her vegetable garden, called her a murderer; at twelve, when she meticulously sliced her own thumb open with a penknife and bled over her mother’s silk party dress, hanging on the bedroom hook. The pattern was unrepeatable, and thus more dangerously ineffable than a single memory. The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.

Glad clutches her book, feeling rather sick. She finds herself recalling incidents that are technically impossible to recall, looking up from her changing table as a weeks-old infant, a miserable ball of heat and squirm observing the haggard look on her mother’s face, then gradually moving forward again, each memory chain-linked only by this: all involved her mother. This is why she doesn’t put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at somebody else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.

But even more alarming is this: the woman who appears as her mother in these memories begins to morph into a woman resembling Sylvia – thinner and more likeably imperious, but Sylvia nonetheless. And she, Glad, is nowhere to be found. Yes, a corner of the red dress she was wearing the day of the explosion protrudes from behind the tree; possibly she can even see her transparent reflection in the rainy Bermuda car window. But she is not an active participant in these recalled scenarios with the unnerving mother / Sylvia composite, she is not a person at all. She is just a psychic recorder, an eye attached to a woundable spirit.

The lights between the oaks snap on, illuminating the drive like a smuggler’s runway, startling her. She is alone, isn’t she? Who turned on the lights? Then Glad remembers the timer she’d had the caretaker install after her brother – a drunk – drove into a tree after dinner and blamed the dark rather than the umpteen glasses of wine he’d consumed. When inebriated, her brother took to confessing amped-up, profanity- and sex-laced versions of his childhood to a painting of their mother. The painting featured their mother as a gimlet-eyed sixteen-year-old girl, one finger encased by a bulky signet ring, both hands resting over a prop book splayed in her lap.

This painting stares at Glad from the wall to her left. The prop book’s spine features a single rectangle of black; the title, though indicated by a line of white-painted switchbacks, remains maddeningly indiscernible. At just the right distance, she’d always believed, the letters would coalesce and she would be able to read the title. As a child she’d stood in front of the painting and stepped forward and backward, forward and backward, adjusting her position by fractions of inches, but no matter – the switchbacks failed to signify. What was this book her mother held for eternity? Why did it matter? Why did she need to know?

Her old frustration disentangles itself from the painting and redirects itself full-forcedly at the absent Sylvia – Sylvia whose shadow she thinks she’s spotted skittering between the oaks. She wishes Sylvia would come back, if only to tell her that her ‘need to know’ was as pointless as Glad’s need to know the title of the book in the painting. It would reveal nothing. And, what’s worse, Glad’s memories are not only opaque and meaningless, they are ultimately more boring than Trouble Astern, in which (Glad flips skimmingly ahead) people are still failing to die. Glad is half tempted to kill someone herself.

Why not? The sky has purpled behind the oak trees, the island indicated only by the faraway blinking of disembodied lights. The kids are still not home, and when they do return, Glad expects they will be drunk or high. It is the perfect time for a murder. She recalls the time when she’d been grounded for half the summer for dropping one of her mother’s diamond studs down a heater vent. She decided to run away with her best friend, and the two had canoed to a nearby island, pitched a tent, tried to build a campfire, and settled down to sleep before realizing that they were cut out for neither campfire-building nor tent-sleeping. At 3 am Glad’s friend deposited her on the beach across from her driveway. Glad expected to be met by her angry parents, but instead the beach was spookily quiet. She walked down the drive, growing increasingly panicked by the property’s creaking emptiness. She picked up a rock and cocked it overhead, planning to strike whatever bear / moose / murderer might try to attack her on the way to the house. Lamplight from the study spread like a white carpet over the lawn. Someone was awake. Her mother, no doubt.

Still terrified, she cocked the rock overhead as she opened the front door, blood thudding in her ears. She couldn’t pinpoint her nervousness; was she still in danger? Or was she the source of danger? She walked through a blue room, then a hall, then to the closed door of the study. She put her hand on the knob. Once she opened the door, there was no going back. She knew this.

She turned the knob. The door opened soundlessly. From above the high back of the armchair covered in green velvet, she could see the graying head of a woman. Glad tiptoed closer, the shadow of her arm extending across the face of her mother in the painting, then rounding the corner like a snake. The woman in the chair did not move. Glad thought she could hear the sound of snoring. How pitiful, she thought. What kind of sad old woman falls asleep at night in her reading chair? What kind of person would so willingly lose control of herself like that? Angrily, Glad raised the rock higher above her head; a sense that she is acting nobly energizes her arm, causing the muscles to tingle. She is saving this person from her own pitiful dreamy tendencies. This is not an act of murder. This is a mercy killing. Just before the rock strikes the woman’s temple, she looks into the window. The last thing Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sees before she dies is the translucent reflection of her own sleeping face, her hands folded peacefully on top of a book whose title is inscrutable.