Edward, wary of dark sublimities, examined the dust jacket. “It won’t bite you,” I said, joking. He placed the book in his briefcase and promised he would “look at it” on the weekend or perhaps on his summer holidays.
“If you’re not going to read it,” I said, testing him, “I’ll give it to someone else.”
For a minute we were pitched straight into one of those little arched silences that lean inward on their own symmetry as though no exterior force existed. Edward took my hand sweetly, then rubbed his thumb across the inside of my wrist, but I noticed he did not promise me anything, and that made me uneasy.
As always, when I’m uneasy, I go out and buy my mother a present. Sometimes I bring her roasted cashews or fresh fruit, but today I take her a copy of Purple Blooms. “A book?” she shouts. She has not read a book since she was a young girl.
Fat and full of fury, she stands most days by an upstairs window and spies on the world. What possible need does she have for books, she asks me. Life is all around her.
To be more truthful, life is all behind her. At eighteen she was crowned North America’s Turkey Queen at Ramona, California and wore a dress that was entirely made up of turkey feathers. She has the dress still, though I’ve never laid eyes on it since she stores it in a fur vault in San Diego, once a year mailing off a twelve-dollar check for storage fees and saying, as she drops the envelope in the mailbox, “Well, so much for misspent youth.”
How I plead with her! Go to a movie, I say. Invite the neighbors in. Take a course in French conversation or gourmet cooking or music appreciation. A year ago she stopped the newspapers. When the picture tube went on the TV, she decided it wasn’t worth fixing. It seems nothing that’s happening in the world has any connection with the eighteen-year-old girl carried so splendidly through the streets of Ramona with a crown of dusky turkey feathers in her hair.
“What do I want with a book about flowers,” my mother growls. Her tone is rough, though she loves me dearly. I explain that the book is not about flowers (and at the same time imagine myself slyly trading on her innocent error at some future gathering of friends). “This poet,” I tell her, “is attempting to recall certain early scenes which bloomed mysteriously and darkly like flowers, and which he now wants to come to terms with.”
This is rather an earful for my mother. She pulls at her apron, looks frowningly at the ceiling, then out the window; this last I recognize as a signal that she wants me to leave, and I do.
Later that afternoon I find myself in the park. Almost everyone knows about the very fine little park at 16th and Ossington—a gem of a park with a wide gravel path and a sprightly round-headed magnolia and smooth painted benches by the side of a bowling green. A cool, quiet place to sit and read, but today it is filled with people.
I stop and ask some schoolchildren what the excitement is about, and a little boy in a striped sweater tells me that Mario Valeso is autographing copies of Purple Blooms over in the shady spot under the magnolia tree. There is a great deal of pushing and shoving and general rowdyism. Everyone, it seems, has brought along a copy of Purple Blooms for Mr. Valeso to sign. Shana is there with Edward, her arm slipped through his, and they both tell me they have “been greatly helped and strengthened” by reading the poems. “It’s all a matter of making connections,” Shana says in her breathless way, and Edward says, “It’s discovering that we all share the same ancestors.”
Then, to my surprise, I catch sight of my mother ahead of me in the crowd, and it pleases me to see she has put on her best cardigan and her white shoes and that she is holding forth loudly to someone or other, saying, “Letting go of the past means embracing the present.” Someone else is saying, “The seeds of childhood grow on mysterious parental soil,” and an old man in a baseball cap is muttering, “We are the sum of our collective memories.”
The crowd grows even larger, and again and again I find myself pushed to the end of the line. I realize it will be hours before my turn comes, and so I pull a book out of my knapsack to help while away the time. It is a new book of poetry, untitled and anonymous, which appears to be a celebration of the randomness and disorder of the world. We are solitary specks of foam, the poet says, who are tossed on a meaningless sea. Every wave is separate, and one minute in time bears no relationship to the moment that precedes or follows it.
I read on and on, and soon forget about the people crowding around me and reading over my shoulder. The bowling green fades into dimness, as do the benches and the magnolia tree and the gravel path, until all that’s left is a page of print, a line of type, a word, a dot of ink, a shadow on the retina that is no bigger, I believe, than the smallest violet in the woods.
Flitting Behavior
SOME OF MEERSHANK’S wittiest writing was done during his wife’s final illness.
“Mortality,” he whispered each morning to give himself comfort, “puts acid in the wine.” Other times he said, as he peered into the bathroom mirror, “Mortality puts strychnine in the candy floss. It puts bite in the byte.” Then he groaned aloud—but only once—and got straight back to work.
His novel of this period, Malaprop In Disneyfìeld, was said to have been cranked out of the word processor between invalid trays and bedpans. In truth, he wept as he set down his outrageous puns and contretemps. The pages mounted, 200, 300. The bulk taunted him, and meanwhile his wife, Louise, lingered, her skin growing as transparent as human skin can be without disintegrating. A curious odor, bitter and yellow, stole over the sickroom. Meershank had heard of the odor which preceded death; now he breathed it daily.
It was for this odor, more than anything else, that he pitied her, she who’d busied herself all her life warding off evil smells with scented candles and aerosol room fresheners. Since a young woman she’d had the habit of sweetening her bureau drawers, and his too, with sprigs of dried lavender, and carrying always in her handbag and traveling case tiny stitched sachets of herbs. He had sometimes wondered where she found these anachronistic sachets; who in the modern industrial world produced such frivolities?—the Bulgarians maybe, or the Peruvians, frantic for hard currency.
Toward the end of Louise’s illness he had a surprise visit from his editor, a vigorous, leggy woman of forty who drove up from Toronto to see how the new manuscript was coming along. She came stepping from her car one Monday afternoon in a white linen jumpsuit. Bending slightly, she kissed Meershank on both cheeks and cried out, “But this is extraordinary! That you can even think of work at a time like this.”
Meershank pronounced for her his bite-in-the-byte aperçu, very nearly choking with shame.
He was fond of his editor—her name was Maybelle Spritz—but declined to invite her into his wife’s bedroom, though the two women knew and liked each other. “She’s not strong enough for visitors,” he said, knowing it was the smell of the room he guarded her from, his poor Louise’s last corner of pride. “Maybe later.”
He and Maybelle sat drinking coffee on the veranda most of the afternoon. The weather all week had been splendid. Birds sang in the branches of Meershank’s trees, and sunlight flooded the long triangle of Meershank’s side lawn. Maybelle, reading slowly as always, turned over the manuscript pages. Her nails were long and vivid. She held a pencil straight up in her hand, and at least once every three minutes or so she let loose a bright snort of laughter which Meershank welcomed like a man famished. He watched her braided loop of auburn hair and observed how the light burned on the tips of her heavy silver earrings. There was a bony hollow at the base of her neck that deepened, suddenly, each time another snort was gathering. Later, at five o’clock, checking his watch, he offered gin and tonic For Louise upstairs he carried cream of celery soup, weak tea and an injection for her hip, which the visiting nurse had taught him to administer.
“Are you feeling lonely?” his wife asked him, turning on one side and readying herself for the needle. She imagined, rightly, that he missed her chatter, that her long days spent in drugged sleep were a deprivatio
n. Every day she asked the same question, plunging him directly into blocky silence. Yes, he was lonely. No, he was not lonely. Which would please her more? He kept his hand on her discolored hip and mumbled the news—testing it—that Maybelle Spritz was thinking of coming for a visit.
She opened her eyes and managed a smile as he rearranged the pillows. He had a system: one pillow under each knee, one at the small of her back and two to support her shoulders. The air in the room was suffocating. He asked again, as he did every day, if he might open a window. No, she said, as she always did; it was too cold. She seemed convinced that spring had not arrived in its usual way, she who’d always been so reasonable.
Downstairs Maybelle stood in the kitchen drinking a second gin and tonic and heating up a noodle pudding she had brought along. She had occasionally been a dinner guest in Meershank’s house, but had never before penetrated the kitchen. She set a little table on the veranda. There was a breeze, enough to keep the mosquitoes away for a bit. Knives and forks; she discovered them easily in the first drawer she opened. The thick white dinner plates she found stacked on a shelf over the sink. There were paper napkins of a most ordinary sort in a cupboard. As she moved about she maveled at the domesticity of the famous, how simple things appeared when regarded close up, like picking up an immense orange and finding it all thick hide on a tiny fruit. She wondered if Meershank would ask her to spend the night.
They had only once before shared a bed, and that had been during the awful week after Louise’s illness has been diagnosed.
The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns.
The word terminal had floated out of the young doctor’s wide pink face; it was twice repeated, until Meershank collected himself and responded with a polite nod. Then he put back his head, counted the ceiling tiles—twelve times fourteen—and decided on the spot that his wife must not be told.
The specialist laced clean hands across flannel knees and pressed for honest disclosure; there were new ways of telling people that they were about to die; he himself had attended a recent symposium in Boston and would take personal responsibility …
No. Meershank held up his hand. This was nonsense. Why did people insist that honesty was the only way of coping with truth? He knew his wife. After thirty-five years of marriage he knew his wife. She must be brought home from the hospital and encouraged to believe that she would recover. Rest, medication, country air—they would work their healing magic. Louise could always, almost always, be persuaded to follow a reasonable course.
The following day, having signed the release papers and made the arrangements to have his wife moved, Meershank, until then a faithful husband, took his editor, Maybelle Spritz, to a downtown hotel and made plodding love to her, afterward begging pardon for his age, his grief, and his fury at the fresh-faced specialist who, concluding their interview, had produced one of Meershank’s books, Walloping Westward, and begged the favor of an inscription. Meershank coldly took out a pen and signed his name. He reminded himself that the Persians had routinely put to death the bearer of bad news.
Home again, with Louise installed in the big front bedroom, he resumed work. His word processor hummed like a hornet from nine to five and the pages flew incriminatingly out of the printer. During the day his brain burned like a lightbulb screwed crookedly into a socket. At night he slept deeply. He wondered if he were acquiring a reputation for stoicism, that contemptible trait! Friends stopped by with gifts of food or flowers. The flowers he carried up to Louise’s bedroom where they soon drooped and died, and the food he threw in the garbage. Coffee cakes, almond braids, banana loaves—his appetite had vanished.
“Eat,” Maybelle commanded, loading his plate.
He loved noodle pudding, and wondered how Maybelle knew. “It’s in your second novel,” she reminded him. “Snow Soup and Won Ton Drift. Remember? Wentzel goes into the café at Cannes and demands that—”
“I remember, I remember.” Meershank held up a hand. (He was always holding up a hand nowadays, resisting information.) He had a second helping, ingesting starch and sweetness. This was hardly fitting behavior for a grieving husband. He felt Maybelle’s eyes on him. “I shoulda brought more,” she said, sounding for a minute like a girl from Cookston Corners, which she was. “I said to myself, he’ll be starving himself.”
For dessert she rummaged in the refrigerator and found two peaches. Louise would have peeled them and arranged the slices in a cut glass bowl. Meershank and Maybelle sat eating them out of their hands. He thought to himself: this is like the last day of the world.
“Ripe,” Maybelle pronounced. There was a droplet of juice on her chin, which she brushed away with the back of her hand. Meershank observed that her eyes looked tired, but perhaps it was only the eye shadow she wore. What was the purpose of eye shadow, he wondered. He had never known and couldn’t begin to imagine.
A character in his first book, Swallowing Hole, had asked this question aloud to another character, who happened to be his wife. What was her name? Phyllis? Yes, Phyllis of the phyllo pastry and philandering nights. “Why do you smudge your gorgeous green eyes with gook?” he, the cockolded husband, had asked. And what had the fair Phyllis replied? Something arch, something unpardonable. Something enclosing a phallic pun. He had forgotten, and for that he blessed the twisted god of age. His early books with their low-altitude gag lines embarrassed him and he tried hard to forget he had once been the idiot who wrote them.
Maybelle, on the other hand, knew his oeuvre with depressing thoroughness and could quote chapter and verse. Well, that was the function of an editor, he supposed. A reasonable man would be grateful for such attention. She was a good girl. He wished she’d find a husband so he would feel less often that she’d taken the veil on his account. But at least she didn’t expect him to converse with wit. Like all the others, she’d bought wholesale the myth of the sad jester.
It was a myth that he himself regarded with profound skepticism. He’d read the requisite scholarly articles, of course, and had even, hypocrite that he was, written one or two himself. Humor is a pocket pulled inside out; humor is an anguished face dumped upside down; humor is the refuge of the grunting cynic, the eros of the deprived lover, the breakfast of the starving clown. Some of these cheap theories he’d actually peddled aloud to the graduating class at Trent a year ago, and his remarks had been applauded lustily. (How much better to lust applaudingly, he’d cackled, sniggered, snorted inside his wicked head.)
He suspected that these theories were leapt upon for their simplicity, their symmetry, their neat-as-a-pin ironic shimmer. They were touted by those so facile they were unable to see how rich with ragged comedy the world really was. But Meershank knew, he knew! Was it not divinely comic that only yesterday he’d received a telephone solicitation from the Jackson Point Cancer Fund? Wasn’t it also comic that the specter of his wife’s death should fill him with a wobbly lust for his broad-busted, perfume-wafting, forty-year-old editor? For that matter, wasn’t it superbly comic that a man widely known as a professional misogynist had remained happily married to one woman for thirty-five years? (Life throws these kinky curves a little too often, Meershank had observed, and the only thing to do was open your fool mouth and guffaw.)
At nine he checked once again on his wife, who was sleeping quietly. If she woke later, a second injection was permitted. He carried a bottle of brandy out on to the veranda. One for the road, he asked Maybelle with his eyebrows. Why not, she said with a lift of her shoulders. Her upper lip went stiff as a ledge in the moonlight and he shuddered to think he was about to kiss her. The moon tonight was bloated and white, as fretful as a face. Everywhere there was the smell of mock-orange blossoms which had bloomed early this year and in absurd profusion. Crickets ticked in the grass, l
ike fools, like drunkards. Meershank lifted his glass. The brandy burned his throat and made him retreat for an instant, but Maybelle became attenuated, lively, sharp of phrase, amusing. He laughed aloud for the first time in a week, wondering if the world would crack down the middle.
It did. Or seemed to. A loud overhead popping noise like the cracking of whips made him jump. Maybelle slammed down her glass and stared. All around them the sky flashed white, then pink, then filled with rat-a-tat-tat fountains and sparks and towering plumes.
“Jesus,” Maybelle said. “Victoria Day. I almost forgot.”
“I did forget,” Meershank said. “I never once thought.”
A rocket whined and popped, made ropy arcs across the sky, burst into petals, leaving first one, then a dozen blazing trails. It was suddenly daylight, fierce, then faded, then instantly replaced by a volley of cracking gunpowder and new showers of brilliance.
The explosions, star-shaped, convulsive, leaping out of the other, made Meershank think of the chains of malignant cells igniting in his wife’s body.
He set down his brandy, excused himself, and hurried upstairs.
Meershank, marrying Louise Lovell in 1949, had felt himself rubbing bellies for the first time with the exotic. He, a Chicago Jew, the son of a bond salesman, had fallen in love with a gentile, a Canadian, a fair-haired girl of twenty who had been gently reared in the Ottawa Valley by parents who lived quietly in a limestone house that was a hundred years old. It faced on the river. There was a rose garden crisscrossed by gravel paths and surrounded by a pale-pink brick wall. Oh, how silently those two parents had moved about in their large square rooms, in winter wrapping themselves in shawls, sitting before pots of raspberry-leaf tea and making their good natured remarks about the weather, the books they were forever in the middle of, the tiny thunder of politics that flickered from their newspaper, always one-day-old.