Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (17 page)

The day I presented this new unit to my English 1 classes, I was more nervous and excited to walk into a classroom than I'd been in years. I realized that I'd been using the same curriculum since the eighties, now dusty, clotted with cobwebs. I'd been teaching Mailer's “The White Negro” for so many years that I no longer even bothered to reread it and had only a nebulous memory of it; what I did remember and reread, and what I taught semester after semester, was not Mailer's “The White Negro” but rather my notes on Mailer's “The White Negro.” I was in effect teaching my teaching of it. Despite the fact that my syllabus's schedule of readings contains the bold and italicized caveat
I reserve the right to change anything and everything
, I hadn't actually changed anything in so long that I now felt like I was walking into my very first class, and my students were quick to notice.

“Hey, Mr. M.,” said one student whose beanie made him look hydrocephalic, “you're looking kinda jittery this morning. And, like, more than usual.”

“I'm fine, Kyle.”

“I'm Robert.”

Like small children, my younger students seem most astute when pointing out someone's flaws. (My neighbors, for example, are chronic, frantic breeders—probably Mormon or Catholic—and not long ago one of their ankle-biting issues sprung forth from a bush as I was walking to my car and said, “You're losing your hair,” with the innocent bluntness some find endearing in children but which, I was quick to tell this child, would not help it win any friends.) As young Robert set his childlike eye on my pre-class nerves, I tried to remind myself that a little investigative truth-telling could actually translate well to our task.

“Attention, class,” I began. “Today begins a new unit.”

“Does that mean we're getting the papers from the last unit back?” an androgynous girl in the front asked.

“Not quite yet. Still grading. While last unit focused on arguments based on personal experience, this unit will focus on making arguments based on empirical evidence.”

“What's ‘empirical'?” someone in the back said. I couldn't make out who, but I saw a red hat.

“It's having to do with an empire,” Robert said. “Like evidence in the Inland Empire. Field trip to some crime scenes in Riverside!”

Most of the class laughed, and a few booed invective for Riverside. “The I.E. is like Satan's asshole,” a guy named (I think) Hector said, to a mixture of laughter and groans.

“After Mexican food,” added Robert.

“No, no,” Hector said, “that'd be too humid.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “No field trips to Riverside, I'm afraid. ‘Empirical' simply means that it is based on verifiable information. It has nothing to do with the word ‘empire.'”

“Dude,” Robert said, “I was just making a joke. I'm not an idiot.”

“But Robert was right when he mentioned crime scenes,” I said. “Building an argument from evidence is just like solving a crime. Which is why we're going to be looking at actual evidence from an actual crime, and try to see if we can come to some conclusions.” I waited for a gasp, some applause. When it didn't come, I said, “A murder.” Still no response, so I continued: “The conclusions we reach will be our thesis, and as I've said before, a good thesis should destabilize a status quo opinion. In this case, that status quo will be a false accusation someone else has made. It will be up to us to look at the evidence, and figure out where that claim went wrong.”

They still didn't seem to be responding with the kind of enthusiasm I'd hoped for. Perhaps they were all contemplating better anatomical metaphors for the Inland Empire (it's always had an armpitty feel to me, personally). In order to get them fired up about
solving a real crime
—or at least exonerating someone falsely accused—I jumped ahead a little and fired up the overhead projector. I'd been saving this for later, but I figured my students needed something a little more sensational, a little less mired in comp-rhet jargon, so I shone a couple crime scene photos up onto the screen. These were the two most iconic Black Dahlia images: Betty Short's body in the grassy lot surrounded by police and reporters, and a close-up of her face, her cheeks slashed.

“This,” I said, “is the crime scene we'll be investigating. Los Angeles, 1947. A young woman's body is discovered . . . ”

But by then people were already groaning and shouting at me to take the photos down. The class fell apart from there. A couple girls excused themselves with their hands over their mouths, and when I
failed to get the rest of them back on track, I threw in the towel and excused them for the day. Fortunately, I had another class an hour later, so I was able to change my approach a little and avoid some of the pitfalls I'd found in my 9:00
AM
class. Instead of showing crime scene photos, I passed out the first week's readings, excerpts from Edie's manuscripts detailing George ——'s pre-Hollywood life. (I blacked out the name
McWeeney
so they wouldn't suspect my connection to the case.)

Edie begins George's backstory with the basics—born in Ohio, dropped out of Yale Med for Yale Drama—but fills in this outline with details pulled from
Untitled
, since its protagonist shares with his author these basic biographical facts, the assumption being that if the basic outline is autobiographical, then it's all true, right down to the description of what the gravel felt like underfoot on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven. Edie also correlates these details with a few culled from our mother's diary from the time. And although we must eventually dismantle Edie's blurring of fact and fiction, for this section the portrait of our father that she presents does seem somewhat reliable. I recognize this George, or at least I can see the seeds of the man and father he would become. I can see his devotion to his work, his perfectionism, certain tics like the nervous underbite, the pacing, all of which you see in Edie's collage reconstruction of the early months of 1941 when George was finishing work on his thesis play at Yale. He was spending every night at rehearsals, watching the director—a fellow MFA student—wrangle the actors together, guide them through the blocking like Anne Sullivan guiding Helen Keller. The actors were still on book, holding their scripts like security blankets, which killed timing, even confused meaning. And it drove George crazy: “Imperfection
on the page could be dealt with, scrutinized under the light, corrected. Imperfection in others, on the other hand, had to be endured” (G. McWeeney 15; E. McWeeney 121). (This bit reminded me of him trying to water Mom's flowers years later, so focused on the controlled world of the written instructions that he fails to notice the less controllable reality.) So after every rehearsal, he went back to his tiny room in a boarding house on Orange Street and pounded out revisions until the “thick gelatinous sunshine seeped through those famous Gothic spires” (G. McWeeney 16; E. McWeeney 122, misquoted as “sunshine
shone
through”), and then he forced these revisions on the production, making enemies with all. But it wasn't just the pressure of the play that was getting to him. For a little over a year now, he'd been seeing Iris Lowell, a senior at Radcliffe. Both would be graduating in the spring, and marriage seemed inevitable. They had met two falls before at the 1939 Harvard/Yale football game. Or rather, they'd met at a diner, just across the Charles, to which they'd both independently escaped after finding the whole “spheroid-hurling divertissement a bit too tribalistic” (according to Iris Lowell's—i.e., my mother's—diary). After this meeting they began exchanging letters and it wasn't long before George was taking the train up to Cambridge. George's letters were “so candid, so open and loquacious,” that it was sometimes difficult for Iris “to reconcile them with the reserved, taciturn man” she met in person (Lowell; E. McWeeney 130). But despite the openness Iris saw in these letters, the one thing George did not seem to divulge—or at least the protagonist of
Untitled
didn't divulge to his girlfriend, and Iris never mentions it in her diary—were his anxieties about the future. He'd given up on being a doctor to pursue the theater and was now facing the uncertain
life of a dramaturge. Technically, he'd taken only a leave of absence from med school, so he could go back, finish his MD, have a stable life, be the bread-winning husband. This seemed to be the responsible thing to do. But he'd hated med school, loathed it with a part of himself so primal that the very idea of going back drained him of the will to leave his bed. In those classes, he'd felt “like he was dissecting not just bodies but the mysteries of what animated those bodies. What he'd found, he had not liked” (G. McWeeney 25; E. McWeeney 131). And yet graduation was quickly approaching, “heading for him like a freight train” (ibid.). If only he'd gone to war, he thought, he “could have been on the other side of the world by now, killing Germans. He'd be risking—perhaps losing—his life, but at least his life would have a simple goal: survival. Everything else would fall away. None of this dilettante waffling” (G. McWeeney 30; omitted by E. McWeeney).

“What,” I asked my English 1 classes a week into the new unit, after they'd gotten a bit more comfortable with the subject matter, “are we to make of this passage?”

“He was tired of being a pussy?” Robert said. He of the squirrely goatee was turning into quite the chatterbox.

“Sure, yes. But what about the timeline here? This ostensibly takes place in January 1941, but when did the United States jump into the War?”

Silence.

“After Pearl Harbor,” I said, “nearly a year later! This is clearly a mistake on the novelist's part, an anachronism.” (I hated myself for denigrating my father's writing this way, but it was necessary: I had to sacrifice the writer for the man.) “So what does that tell us?”

“That he was a bad writer?” (Robert again.)

“No, no. Not at all, actually. I mean, Shakespeare's oeuvre was filled with anachronisms.”

“What's an ‘oeuvre'?” a girl in the back asked.

“We can check my anatomy textbook,” Robert said.

“Anachronisms do not negate literary merit,” I said, straining to be heard over the laughter. “In
Macbeth
people use dollars as currency despite the fact that dollars would not have been around in Macbeth's time.” (I felt I saved my dad a bit with that one.) “No, what this tells us is that George's novel cannot be an accurate portrayal of the author's life. The thoughts of the protagonist cannot be the thoughts of the author in 1941 because America was not in the war yet!”

One possibility that did pop into my mind while I was explaining this to my class, but which I did not go into then (I could tell I was losing them a bit with
Macbeth
), was that the unnamed protagonist could have been considering going overseas to independently volunteer the same way Robert Jordon took it upon himself to fight in the Spanish Civil War in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. That novel is actually referenced reverentially in
Untitled
. It was published in 1940, so those dates do line up.

Regardless, I still have trouble pointing out possible flaws with this war-fantasy passage because I do think it's a transcendent piece of writing. Considering this was the eighth draft of the novel, it's possible my dad kept it in there through all those revisions simply because it was a darling he couldn't bring himself to kill. After all, it's a passage that works at every level: Not only does it anticipate the so-called crisis in masculinity that would beset George's generation when the war ended,
its frantic syntax perfectly captures the inner turmoil of the protagonist and melds it with the equally turbulent New England blizzard that he is driving through while thinking this. The passage occurs when he is driving up to Cambridge to see Irene (the character whom Edie posits is our mother Iris's fictional counterpart). He usually took the train, but on this particular weekend his old roommate had left town and let George borrow his blue 1939 Chevy Deluxe. George thought he'd surprise Iris by picking her up in this “fine looking vehicle” (G. McWeeney 133).

I've now been looking at those last two sentences for a few minutes. I'm wary of making the same tragic mistake Edie does in conflating fact and fiction, in seeing the characters in
Untitled
as reliable representatives of George McWeeney and Iris Lowell, but I see that I have let their real names slip in there. I suppose I can be excused since my mother's diary does confirm that, after a few hours' delay in the storm, George pulled up to her dormitory in a “eminently handsome automobile,” but this is also the point in Edie's reconstruction that the George on the page parts ways with the George I recognize as the man who would become my father. I do not want there to be any confusion between those two people; indeed, my whole task here is to separate them. But I am, I must remind myself, dealing with Edie's version here. So I am forced to refer to this man, this fictional character, as George also. So be it. I will parse the two Georges in the pages to come.

Either way, the particular scene where these two Georges part ways occurs shortly after the war-fantasy. George—according to Edie—had never driven to Cambridge before, had always taken the train, plus it was blizzarding outside, so he got a little lost and overshot by
about fifteen miles. He was already in Lynn, Massachusetts, when he realized he needed directions and pulled into a gas station and asked a young woman how to get to Cambridge, a young woman who, seeing his fancy wheels, begins flirting with him ruthlessly. I'm referring, of course, to the scene in which he meets the woman whom Edie claims is a fictionalized version of Frances Cochran, Ms. Short's supposed precursor, Annabel Lee to Betty's Lolita. In the novel the young woman is named Fanny and described as having “black hair, a velvet curtain” and “skin whiter than the snow outside,” and while it's true that this clearly matches the real Frances Cochran, this does not prove that the real George actually met the real Frances Cochran. As Edie points out, when she went through our father's things she found a scrapbook containing newspaper articles about both Frances Cochran and Betty Short. What Edie admitted to me in real life but makes no mention of in her book is that our father routinely scoured the crime pages for interesting stories that he could use in
Rampart
plots. The only thing this correlation between the character of Fanny in the novel and the real-life Frances Cochran proves is that George clearly drew inspiration from the news. The idea that it reveals anything beyond that is simply ridiculous. But, as I explained to my English 1 classes, we can see actual evidence in the text that proves these scenes were imagined rather than remembered. While the first thirty or so pages of
Untitled
are written with a kind of clarity that suggests they are sourced from memory, from this gas station scene onward the details are blurrier, the lens smeared with a little Vaseline. After page 35, I've noted a fifteen percent decline in tactile descriptions, a ten percent drop in olfactory observations, and a five percent rise in cliché descriptions (sorry, Dad, I'm doing
this for you). The most damning piece of evidence against Edie's claim that George actually met the real Frances Cochran is that one description of her is actually lifted—though surely accidentally—from George's source material. On page 39, he describes Fanny as “death on auto rides,” since she would force him to drive dangerously fast, screaming with orgasmic delight as the Chevy Deluxe reached eighty, ninety, one hundred. This phrase, “death on auto rides,” first appeared in a
Boston Globe
article from July 20, 1941, in which a friend of Frances's uses it to describe the then-missing girl. This proves that George's idea of Frances Cochran was based not on personal experience but entirely on what the media reported about her. And although this bit of plagiarism is just one of the many pieces of evidence that will exonerate my father, I do feel obligated to point out that there is no proof that he lifted this phrase intentionally. I'm sure he was simply typing along when the phrase popped into his brain and, perhaps not remembering that he'd read it in one of the articles he'd clipped and stuck in his scrapbook, assumed that he'd thought of it himself. It happens all the time. When I gave Oliver a draft of my first novel, for example, he pointed out no less than seventeen phrases that, it turns out, I'd accidentally borrowed from Chandler. I made the corrections, no harm done. Point being, however, that while George clearly based the character of Fanny on the real-life Frances Cochran, it is undoubtedly clear that he never actually met the woman. During January and February of 1941, while the protagonist of
Untitled
begins a graphically described affair with this woman—copulating with her that day in the backseat of the Deluxe and then continuing to stop off in Lynn for a quickie with her on his way to visiting Irene in Cambridge—the real George
was surely just sitting in New Haven, pecking out endless revisions of his play and wondering how he'd afford an engagement ring for Iris. This is not to say that I find the chapters describing this affair anything less than vivid (“the brackish bouquet of Fanny's moist fanny” is one of those sentences that really sears itself into your mind and nostrils) and heartbreaking: You can really feel the protagonist's confusion, his frantic guilt. The sex is both erotic and neurotic, the libidinous inseparable from the self-lacerating. He's clearly terrified about his future, terrified about committing to Irene, to adulthood, and is simply acting out. I wisely did not excerpt these scenes for my students, but during one of my pre-class prep-sessions, when I had these pages spread out on my bed, Julia walked in. She'd been in the living room watching pornography for some research she was doing on tropes of female degradation, and said, “You know, there are some fantastically beautiful penises working in the adult industry. But then out of nowhere, there'll be a weird one, like where the head is malformed and pointy. I don't get it. You'd think there would be standards. Anyway. What you got here?” She began perusing the material like a woman at a yard sale, and was soon eyeing the “Fanny Affair” chapters from
Untitled
and tittering like a teenager with a pilfered copy of
Lolita
. “Oh, my, my,” she said, “what have we here?” While I continued my work—deciding on the exact order of the readings for my class—she curled up on the bed and read through my dad's racy chapters. “Well,” she concluded a few minutes later (the speed at which she reads always unnerves me), “I suppose if you're trying to make the argument that he didn't actually know this woman, all this banging is pretty good evidence.”