The final case, p.18
The Final Case, page 18
“Take them,” the attorney said, referring to the articles. “I brought them for you and your family.”
I took them. The attorney said, “We’d been appointed. By a judge. Because Bayer couldn’t pay. He’d mangled his arm in an accident and lived on disability in a group home somewhere. What did we make—fifty bucks each? I asked your father did he want to have a drink. I told him I’d stand him to a couple of drinks. He turned me down. He said he couldn’t do it because he had this other case. Another appointed case. Same thing. Fifty bucks. I don’t think he was even thirty yet.”
I said, “He was in the middle of a trial when the end came. Maybe that was good.”
My father’s co-counsel in the case of State of Washington v. Ernie Bayer reached, with a shaky hand, to pick up his glass of punch again. “Good for him,” he said, “but not for the State. They’re going to have to wipe everything out and start over again with a new trial.”
* * *
—
My mother stayed in the house where she’d lived with my father. About a month after he died, I went there to help her get rid of things. Getting rid of things had been a staple of her life starting at the age of about sixty-five, as it is for many older people, at least where I live—namely, where a lot of them have so much stuff that getting rid of it is a burden. So it was for my mother, who was hyperaware—and ironic on the subject—of the absurdity of these circumstances in which divestiture is never-ending. She was sometimes self-abasing about it, but, ultimately, she was serious in her concerted efforts, and felt, too, that by getting rid of things she was beating down a bulging flaw in her DNA, or an instinct to hoard, or a debilitating anxiety about material well-being, which, she said, had roots part nature and part nurture, since she’d grown up during the Depression and had seen her parents knot stray bits of string together as opposed to buying string in length. We worked in the basement, where she wore a sweater, because it was eternally clammy there, a sweater she’d knitted while half watching television over the course of the last winter—it had a loose warp and woof and was a pullover, roomy, but it gave her trouble, she said, because of her frozen shoulder; what she needed was a button-up; that would be easier. At any rate, sheathed in her sweater, my mother rummaged boxes and plastic tubs, and vetted items with prolonged consideration, articulating, at times, their associated pros and cons, pondering in or out, yes or no, keep or toss, give, donate, sell, reconsider—she had categories, one of which incorporated items she couldn’t part with because of sentimental feeling, and as she held, cupped, and examined these, she spoke, sometimes, of their sources of power. For her they were items not to be trifled with in the name of their subtle but tangible resonances. Each was a talisman with magical properties. They were imbued with memory, story, and event, and in the course of time had gone from mere phenomena to sacred vessels of personal history. They were simultaneously a nuisance and completely necessary. My mother had grown old without losing the better part of innocence when it came to keepsakes. “Look,” she said, after opening a box on the day I came to help her. “These are things I slated for repair. I had the idea that one day I’d come down here and fix all this.” She unwrapped, then, a froth of light paper, revealing under it a porcelain swan figurine. The head and part of the neck had snapped off, and the loose piece had been taped across the closed left wing. “I thought I’d find the right brand of glue for this, but I never did,” she said. “Your father gave it to me for my birthday before you were born. This is going to get me crying,” she added. Which is something she’d been doing, off and on, since he’d died.
* * *
—
The next day, Danielle left Cajovna in the hands of her tea experts so that she and I could rent a van, park it at the loading dock beneath my father’s office building, take the freight elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, and remove all traces of his existence from the premises. We came and went through a side door, wheeling rented dollies that squeaked as they progressed, hauling them up empty and then down again loaded with boxes held in place behind built-in straps. As discreet as we were about it, we were not unnoticeable, and as such received condolences and fielded inquiries, and were asked why we were doing this ourselves as opposed to hiring movers, a question Danielle fielded with the frank response that we had a hard time writing a check to someone for something we were capable of handling ourselves, elaborating that this was a way of thinking ingrained in us to the extent that it was hard to turn it around, so here we were, and, really, it wasn’t too bad of a job because of the freight elevator, the dollies, and the loading dock. Given that she was six foot four and had a tendency to lurch about like a giant, and appeared, on top of that, generally rugged, with thick, flat bones in her arms, there was no reason for anyone not to believe her when she spoke this way. And as for me, I stayed in the background and let Danielle take the lead in addressing interlocutors, or, rather, she took it as she always has, since she’s older than me by four years and has a tendency to lead anyway, in all of life’s circumstances. (Though she’s not convinced that her style in this arena is conducive to the best outcomes. Cajovna, she thought, would do better with someone at the helm who wasn’t quite so blunt.) At any rate, on we went with our box packing and box moving well into afternoon, until my father’s office was stripped down to a bare desk and a bare credenza, three chairs, empty file cabinets, and picture hooks with no job to do, since we’d relieved them of all the framed certificates and licenses my father had hung in his office. We also left a small heap of keys in a drawer, since we could associate them with no purpose. Then we were done and had our last loads strapped to our dollies, and were about to exit for good but hesitated, and at this juncture Danielle said, “What do you think, should we pull the blinds?” And so she pulled the blinds, darkening the emptied room, leaving just a little afternoon light to bleed between the slats, and then she led the way out, wheeling her dolly, and I switched off the overhead lights.
* * *
—
The thought of incinerating my father’s files, or of recycling them so that they ended up as molded pulp packaging—as egg filler flats, cushioning trays, take-out food tubs, or clamshell containers—was more than just unpalatable to me. I wasn’t ready, and neither was Danielle, and so the boxes full of files ended up in the room where in past years I’d written novels, as I said at the outset of this book, and filled nearly all of it, but with enough left over for my desk and chair, and were stacked so high I feared they would topple and break a window. With that in mind, I opened the door to that room every now and then to see if they were canting or veering toward disaster; possibly, some effect of humidity, I thought, might have weakened the cardboard enough to undermine my precarious arrangement, or maybe the unfailing work of entropy, generalized, would be the ambiguous and inexorable root of their undoing. But no. They rested there the way totem objects rest in ancient crypts, inertly enduring and gathering dust—gathering it until, in the throes of one of my domestic fevers, I dusted that room, dusted right up to the ten reference books that had for years sat at the left back corner of my desk between bookends devised from beach stones, and while I was doing that, a bird glanced off the window in a sudden, rapping blur that caught me by so much surprise that I jumped. It wasn’t the first visitation of this sort I’d absorbed in my garret. Over the years, my fictions, largely concocted in a welter of daydreaming, had now and then been interrupted by a sudden knock against glass, and by a flash of wings and feathers as a jarred bird canted off; anyway, this occurred now, while I was up there dusting books, and brought me to a halt, so that I stood for a moment collecting myself before determining to widen my domestic efforts by taking on the smear this bird had made. When I swung the window out to clean it, though, dulled black flies fell from their holds in the jambs onto my desk, so that I had to pick them up one at a time and cast them out. While doing this, I noticed that it was getting on toward evening, and that swallows were feeding in arcs behind our house, and that an owl waited on a tree branch as the light faded. I hung out by the open window, monitoring bird activity, and then shut it and read bits and pieces of things I’d made up, written down, left behind, and forgotten about. Naturally, my mind edited these variegated scribblings, pruning and grooming erratic dross that would never see the light of day.
The next morning, as I approached Cajovna—where I was headed to drink tea and read while in proximity to other people—I saw, seated in its coveted front window alcove, a man of my age, poised over tea, with his elbows wide and a book open in front of him, reading placidly through half-frame glasses. I knew who he was. I used to see him at the swimming pool where I go with Alison. After his laps, he would stand for long periods on his head outside the locker room, which, for no reason vulnerable to logic, I’d found irritating. In fact, his headstands were so maddening that toward him I’d cast spells. I’d wanted him to crash in a heap, or at least decide to do his headstands in private. Now, at Cajovna’s door, something in my brain once again told my body to surge with irritation, and I became possessed by loathing of his slouch, by his self-serving appropriation of a window perch and street view, by the points of his elbows, by the close cropping of silver hair above his ears, and—most awful—by the way he looked up at me with a beckoning expression, an unbecoming half smile, as if to say I should acknowledge our familiarity as swimmers, as if to say I should recall with admiration his long, steady headstands, and, worst of all, as if to say that the two of us should converse on a regular basis because, his expression implied, we had things in common. When in fact, I insisted to myself, we had nothing in common and never could, that was impossible and infuriating both, the very idea that he and I could have something in common prompted in me a ridiculous anger, one that lingered past all reason. It was this aging tea tippler who was wasting his time, not me; it was this graying milquetoast who was wrong about everything, not me; it was this banal creep who was worthy of a shunning and deplorable to everyone he met, not me. Studiously, then, I refused to make eye contact with him, just as I had in the swimming-pool locker room, in tight quarters, where conversation about chlorine or water temperature would have been natural and polite, but, no, I’d consistently kept my head down instead and stayed mum—why? No legitimate reason. I went into Cajovna, passed him by, sat down, and opened my book, but I couldn’t concentrate, nor could I enjoy my tea. Instead, I sat there thinking that certain Cajovna customers were dismissing me because I no longer exhibited vestiges of youth. I was beyond the pale. My existence was twilit. Then I remembered that, in John Updike’s Bech: A Book, there’s a vignette wherein Bech—a fictional novelist—sees “pulpy stalks of bundled nerves oddly pinched to a bud of concentration in the head” where there are people, the better to encourage detachment, for what difference did it make if “a hairy bone knob” was thinking this or that about him, it all came to nothing either way, those thoughts were just some “trillion circuits” generating “an excess of electricity” in “some pounds of jelly.” So this was another way I passed my time in the wake of the Harvey trial. Milling at Cajovna, lost in human frailty, taking cues about life from Updike (who, just a few years expired, was already receding into a delegitimized canon), and, like the headstand man, looking out a window to where, since it was fall in Seattle, rain fell.
* * *
—
Alison and I had a lunch date with friends at a place called Bill’s Diner. Our friends were a couple—Belinda, a poet, and Cal, who, guided by wanderlust, had passed a good part of her life as an itinerant English-language instructor; Singapore, for example, figured in her anecdotes, as did Okinawa. The four of us ate sandwiches and potato chips in a booth, where Cal explained that she now had “grandmother disease,” meaning that she was addicted to her six-month-old grandson, to the impossibly pristine scent of his innocent cheeks, his cooing noises, his flailing hands and feet as she shook a rattle for him, his bottle time, his naps in her arms, and also—another category of symptoms—to taking profligate photographs and sharing them, and to detailing for the benefit of friends (Cal put “benefit” in air-quote marks) his latest developmental feats—for example, rolling over from back to tummy but not the other way yet, or eating sweet-potato mush for the first time.
So what else is new? Alison asked our friends. Cal said that she had relatives in Montenegro—a boatbuilder in Ulcinj and a nun in Podgorica—and that she now owned a condominium there, on the Adriatic, where she and Belinda had recently passed a sumptuous August (“Ridiculously sumptuous,” Belinda put in) on a bluestone terrazzo beneath a deep awning, wisteria climbing a wall behind them, white sand stuck between their toes, a pitcher of lime-and-mint-infused water and a bottle of Polish vodka on ice close at hand, pickled herring and goat cheese in the refrigerator, rye crackers, almonds, and walnuts in the cupboard, grapes and satsumas on a wicker table in the shade, and sea salt encrusted on their arms while Belinda read poetry journals and Cal plowed her way, resolutely, through everything written by Virginia Woolf.
What else? Cal’s father, who was ninety-three and lived in Carefree, Arizona, had gotten married for the third time. Belinda and Cal had gone to the wedding; in fact, they’d been the wedding planners and, as Belinda said, had met the couple’s request for celebratory watermelon aspic with goose-liver terrine. What else? Belinda had a “grinding hip” and was seeing a physical therapist for it; meanwhile, Cal had “acquired a syndrome.” “I go to sleep at night,” she said, “and there’s this noise like a bomb going off. I mean really, except no one hears it but me.”
“Exploding-head syndrome,” explained Belinda.
“Exploding-head syndrome,” Cal said. “About twice a week.”
“Sometimes they call it ‘auditory sleep start,’ ” said Belinda.
“Our doctor had no idea,” said Cal. “So I had to go to a sleep-disorders clinic.”
“The same one I went to for apnea,” said Belinda. “Which it turned out I didn’t have.”
“She just snores,” explained Cal. “It’s not apnea.”
“But your thing…” said Belinda.
“Mine,” said Cal. “One in a billion get it, and I got it.”
“They ruled things out,” said Belinda. “She doesn’t have a tumor.”
“Or epilepsy,” added Cal. “Or any other real problem. Just exploding-head syndrome, which, let me tell you, is a rush.”
“Honey,” said Belinda.
“Sweetie,” answered Cal. “Anyway, I thought you might like to know about it, in case it fits into a novel someday. A character with exploding-head syndrome.”
“Why not?” said Belinda. “A character with exploding-head syndrome.”
We ate. Cal said she and Belinda would be in Carefree soon to visit her remarried father. “We were worried at first,” Belinda said, “because we didn’t know the woman.”
“I’m still worried,” said Cal.
“We thought she might be one of those women who prey on men in nursing homes.”
“She is one of those,” said Cal.
“But then we got to know her,” said Belinda. “She’s eighty-six and in a wheelchair.”
“What does that matter? I still don’t trust her.”
“And I would say she’s cultivated,” Belinda pressed on. “In the sense that she has a classical education.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s financially solvent.”
“Every Wednesday, she gets her hair done. Every Thursday, spa treatment. And a good sense of humor, which your father appreciates.”
“He’s lost his marbles.”
“He’s ninety-three.”
“Anyway,” said Cal, “you guys?”
We shrugged. Then Belinda asked me if I was writing anything. I said no. Cal said Belinda, who’d recently published, had been assaulted in print by a fellow poet. Cal laughed about that. She said that someone once broke into a bookstore overnight and not only riddled Billy Collins’s Nine Horses with a shotgun but defaced Collins’s author portrait. She then regaled us with a story about two poets who’d brawled at a convention in front of hundreds of academics, and with a description of the Stony Brook mêlée of 1968, during which Allen Ginsberg sunk to his knees in an effort to promote nonviolence between bards. There was, furthermore, the matter, said Cal, of major poetry prizes judged by a rotating, incestuous cast of vengeful backstabbers and the permanently pricked. Grants, awards, endowed chairs, lectureships, all were bruised by insidious envy. Hiring was marred by it, publication skewed by it. Poets, said Belinda, were Machiavellian potentates, and their bodies of work insecure city-states. “Be glad you’re a fiction writer,” she said.
* * *
—
The next morning, I went to a coffee shop to meet a fiction writer I knew named Louden James who’d e-mailed to say he’d like to reconnect. Arriving early, I bought coffee, perched on a stool, and read a novel until he tapped me on the shoulder. I actually didn’t know Louden very well. We’d met, we’d chatted at this or that event, drinks in hand maybe, or standing in a corner, I suppose commiserating or name-dropping or pretending to be busier and more important than we were, two novelists. I liked him, though. He was droll in a way I understood as a kindness. He appeared not to have combed his hair, ever; there wasn’t a lot of it, but what he had was like the snarled tendrils of a bird nest, gray, found where two walls still met after a tornado. That made him look, in his drab olive khakis and checked sport coat tightly bunched at its armpits, like Kurt Vonnegut—long face and drooping eyes suggesting whimsy, melancholy, eclecticism, and metaphysical propensities. He was, like me, in the middle of his life, steeped in his years but not brutalized by them. He did, though, exhibit compromised coordination; in his rumpled presence, you worried that he would knock over something fragile—a coffee cup, maybe—while sitting down or standing up.
