Erasure (8 page)

For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.” He once said to me in a museum, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.

Lorraine had been the housekeeper since before I was born. She liked me as a child. She liked me as a young adult. But when she opened a book of mine and discovered the word
fuck,
she stopped liking me. From that point on she was polite, but curt, never overtly displeased by my presence, but clearly not anticipating any grief upon my departure. Lorraine, as far as I knew, never had a life away from my family. She had days off, but I didn’t know where she went, if she went anywhere. She even went with us to the beach in the summers. But she was not our nanny. If we had a problem, we went to Mother. If we needed rides someplace, we went to Mother. If we needed food or clean clothes, we went to Lorraine.

“Good evening, Mr. Monk,” she said as I entered the house with my sister.

“How are you, Lorraine?” I asked.

“Getting older every day.”

“You don’t look it,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Lisa took my jacket to hang in the closet as if I were a real visitor. I looked at the house again. I had loved the house as a kid. It was a large two-story with many rooms and nooks and a finished basement apartment in which Lorraine resided. But it now seemed cold, despite how high the heat was turned. The drapes covering the windows were heavy, the wood of the stairway bannister and door jambs dark and somber.

“Mrs. E is already at the table,” Lorraine told us and led us into the dining room as if we didn’t know the way.

Mother remained seated when we entered. Her eyes were red and weak. We leaned to kiss her and she patted our cheeks.

“Are you feeling okay, Mother?” Lisa asked.

“She missed her nap today, Dr. Lisa,” Lorraine said.

We sat on either side of our mother. I poured the wine and Mother waved it off.

“Did you take your medication?” Lisa asked.

“I did. All three thousand pills.” Mother fanned her off the subject. “How was your meeting?” she asked me, having forgotten our earlier conversation.

“It’s over, that’s the important part.”

“You presented a paper?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“On?”

“Just some stuff about novels and literary criticism. Dry, boring, meaningless stuff. I actually just came to see you.”

“That’s my sweetheart, Monksie. But why aren’t you staying here with me?”

“Since I am at the conference, I need to be near the proceedings.” I looked at my sister. “I did go down to Lisa’s clinic earlier. She’s really doing good work.”

“She’s just like her father.” By the way she said it, it was not clear it was a good thing. Then she aked me, “Are you still driving that station wagon?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Lorraine came in with the dinner. The roast beef was lean. The broccoli and cauliflower were overcooked and the grains of rice were so separate and distinct that it was near impossible to pick them up with a fork. Lorraine came in a couple of times to check on us.

Lisa put down her fork and picked up her wine glass, held it over her plate without drinking. “Mother, I’ve been going over the books and I believe you’re going to have to sell Father’s office. The upkeep is costing so much that the rent is meaningless.”

“That was your father’s office.”

“Yes, Mother. You’ve got the other properties,” Lisa said.

“Your father started out in that office in nineteen fifty. You weren’t born yet. Bill was just a year old.”

“Well, I’m putting the office up for sale. It’s something we have to do.” Lisa was tugging at the corners of her napkin, a tic she’d had since childhood.

“It was your father’s office, dear.”

“I know that, Mother.” Lisa looked at me.

“Mother,” I got her attention. “When’s the last time you visited Father’s office?” She didn’t have an answer. “The fact is, you hardly ever went there when Father
was
practicing. Now, it’s completely different. It even looks different from the outside.” I reached over and took her hand. “Lisa knows what’s best.”

“Oh, Monksie.” Mother sniffed in her tears. “You’re such a sweet child, always have been. And so smart. You get that from your father, did you know that?”

I glanced over at Lisa to see that she was eating again.

“Of course, we’ll sell the office.”

“Just like that,” Lisa said. “Monk chimes in and you’re hooked on the idea. Christ.”

Lorraine stepped into the room just in time to hear her lord’s name used in vain. She collected our plates and issued an admonishing “Hmmph, hmmph, hmmmph” as she exited.

Mother complained of a headache and we had dessert without saying much. Then Lorraine came in and mercifully informed us of Mother’s approaching bedtime. We kissed the old lady goodnight and watched Lorraine walk her upstairs.

Sitting in my sister’s car outside my hotel, I apologized for butting in about the sale of the office at the dinner table.

“No, you helped,” she said. “Thanks.”

“I’m sorry she always reacts to me like that.”

“Monk, you’re special. I don’t mean just the way Mother, and Father when he was alive, treated you. I’ve always thought that. I just wanted you to know.”

I looked out the window at the street. “I think the same about you, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” She smiled. Her smile had always been so confident that I was jealous of it. Her smile always made me relax.

I kissed my sister goodbye, told her I’d talk to her soon and went into my hotel where I found Linda Mallory waiting in the lobby.

“Hi, Linda.”

“I’ve been thinking about your paper.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Would you like to go upstairs and fuck me?”

“No, Linda.”

“I’m having a real crisis,” she said. “I really need to have some sex. I need it for self-validation.”

“I’m sorry, Linda.”

She stormed past me, out the door and into the street. Then I heard my name being shouted from outside. It was a bit embarrassing as I turned to find the hotel staff and a couple of guests staring at me. I stepped out and on the narrow path leading through the yard was Davis Gimbel.

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now,”
he said.

The words had little effect on me, save to announce Gimbel’s disturbed, certifiable, and agitated postmodern state. Behind the short, bomber-jacketed academic were Linda Mallory, seething with pent-up sexual frustration, and three other intellectually homeless academics aching to see a fight.

“What’s this all about, Gimbel?” I asked.

“There’s nothing to compare it to now,” he said.

“Okay.” I stepped down the steps to take the noise away from the stoop. “Listen, I’m sorry you didn’t like the paper, but I believe you misunderstood something. I don’t even think about you guys, much less write about you.”

That really got him mad. He circled me as best he could in the small space and even pounded his chest with a closed fist once or twice. “You don’t think much of postmodern fiction, do you?” he said. “Like all avant-garde movements, we never have time to finish what we set out to accomplish.”

I looked at his face in the street and moon lights and found it no more or less ugly for its contorted state. “What did you set out to accomplish?”

“You know good and well. You and your kind, you interrupted us.”

“My kind?” I let that go. “Interrupted you? By not paying attention?”

“The whole culture. You’re just one of the sheep.”

“What the hell are you talking about, man? Are you drunk?”

He continued his circling. A couple of unassociated people stopped at the gate to watch. “Of course, if an avant-garde movement ever achieves its purpose, then it ceases to be avant-garde. By the mere fact that it opposes or rejects established systems of creation, it has to remain unfinished. Do you even understand what I’m saying? We are defunct practitioners of defunct art.”

“You know what your problem is, Gimbel?” I said, leaning away from him. “You actually think you’re saying something that makes sense. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

That’s when the little Hemingway doll took a poke at me. I sidestepped the swing and watched him roll into an azalea bush. Linda and the other defunct artists rushed to his aid. I offered a shrug to the confused bystanders and stepped away toward the door.

Gimbel was on his knees now and he yelled, “Postmodern fiction came and went like the wind and you missed it. And that’s why you’re bitter, Ellison.”

I stopped, not believing that the man had actually come to fight me because of a paper that I only barely took seriously. Standing over them all on the steps, I said, “I don’t mean to disparage or belittle what you do, Gimbel. I don’t know what you do.”

Gimbel found his legs and stood straight, puffed up his chest. “I have unsettled readers. I have made them uncomfortable. I have unsettled their historical, cultural and psychological assumptions by disrupting their comfortable relationship between words and things. I have brought to a head the battle between language and reality. But even as my art dies, I create it without trying.”

His little group applauded.

“Man, do you need to get laid,” I said, shook my head and stepped through the door.