Erasure (10 page)

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.