Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (6 page)

You are Lang and you write: The woman who claimed to be my daughter was still standing in the garden. Bathed in the afternoon light as she was I was still not prepared to admit a resemblance, but I did think she was pretty. I hadn’t thought that before and I wondered about how the gaze of parents is always so clouded. It’s hard to imagine a mother saying, This is my son Bobby, he’s uglier than a plastic bag of shit, but he’s mine. But that’s not quite the voice, is it? Again. Outside, I found Meg Caro staring at the pile of rhizomes. You can imagine that my wife is a little upset. She nodded. I have to tell you that I really don’t remember your mother and I’m not the sort of person who forgets the women with whom he’s slept. I mean, there haven’t been that many. I only know what she told me. I bit my lip and nodded, realized that we were just going round and round. I suppose we need a paternity test. You wouldn’t happen to know how we go about that, would you? No. I can ask my friend. Do you have a number where I can reach you? She gave me a number and told me it was her cell. Sylvia came and stood by me as we watched her walk back down the drive to the car she’d left near the mailbox. I’m going to call her when I know how to get the test. Sylvia turned and walked away, back toward the house. You can’t be upset with me about this. This I knew was completely untrue. How could she be anything else? And the last thing I needed was to compound the problem by further denying my relationship to Meg Caro or especially making an appeal that we consider the poor young woman’s feelings. I wonder what she wants was the only thing Sylvia said at the table that evening. My response was, I can’t imagine. The evening was difficult. My routine was to go out to my studio after dinner and work until Sylvia was well asleep, but tonight that seemed a bad idea. Yet so did the breaking of routine seem like a bad idea. In fact no ideas presented themselves for consideration. I could not abandon Sylvia with the weight of the situation and yet sitting and stewing with her in the cauldron of anxiety that was our bedroom appeared no better. All I could imagine hearing, since there was no speaking, was the bubbling of the bubbling broth around us and an occasional pop from the fire. Then my mind turned from my concern for Sylvia and by extension my concern for myself vis-à-vis Sylvia, to simply me or perhaps simple me. Just what kind of massive quagmire had my, I imagined, rather average-sized sexual appendage gotten me into some twenty-eight years ago, leaving me to roam through life happily, though clumsily, for so long, only to find myself feeling for the bottom of the mess with my foot while trying not to drown, laying my arms angel-like flat, as I had read in survival books, so that I might just float out and to safety, my organ, my penis, my stupid dick, for all the pleasure that I had imagined that it gave me, what had it done to me now, if indeed it had done anything at all, because I really did not recall the face of the woman in the photograph, the mother of my alleged daughter, and I was no playboy, was always rather backward, awkward, if not plain ugly, had thought myself so lucky that Sylvia would even give me the time of day and thought when she did that it was because she believed she could feel secure with a homely man that other women did not find attractive, but there had been others, a few, and I thought I remembered every one of them and every name and who could forget a name like Carly Caro, alliteration having always worked throughout life as an irritant on me, and I had not been the kind of man who had oneor two-night stands, at least it was never my desire, as I was always just a little needy and clingy and was possessed by the desire to not be that kind of man and why wouldn’t this Katie Caro have told me that she was gravid, enceinte, fraught, in a family way, parturient, with child, replete, expectant, about to bear fruit, knocked up? Was I so unattractive a man that even when he got a woman pregnant she would flee for the hills? And if I was that off-putting, physically or intellectually, why should she have kept the child at all? I mean, there were ways, and why would she then tell the poor genetically disadvantaged child who her father was? Perhaps upon learning of my career, that there was one at all, she decided that there was possibly a bit more to me than had met her eye (and apparently other parts), or maybe she thought, mercenarily, that there was something to be had, and oh how mistaken this Chloe Caro and her daughter were. What if it was all just a big mistake? A faux pas. Or worse, a ruse. A scam. We’d get the test done wherever one goes to get such a test done and we would discover that I was no more related to Meg Caro than I was to Chuck Berry or Igor Stravinsky and yet somehow I knew that if my pecker came out of this mess clean, untarnished, Sylvia and I would never again be the same. I just didn’t know why that would be so, but I knew it all the same, talking to each other would be difficult, I would not know where to stand when she brushed her teeth, when to leave to work, when to come back or how to touch her in or out of bed, and I was filled right then with such sadness and perhaps terror that I was far less afraid of Meg Caro’s actually being proved my daughter. I thought all of this while Sylvia and I lay in our queen-sized bed (she’d never wanted a king because we’d be too far apart), on opposite edges, the six-hundred-thread-count sheets she’d insisted on, growing as cold as an overworn cliché between us and the colder that space became the more difficult it became to traverse. When her back was turned, though she was nowhere near sleep, I glanced under the covers at my dick and it looked so innocent, harmless, and at that particular moment, pathetic.

How could I have let him, you, lie there so miserably and do that to his, my, wife? He would have to have gone out to his studio and stared at a painting, one in progress, or one that he thought was finished but really wasn’t. A large canvas with reds and yellows. Goldenrod, corn silk, chiffon, cadmium yellow, lemon, bismuth yellow, Indian yellow, ocher, Naples yellow, jaune brilliant, burnt sienna, transparent maroon, Venetian red, Indian red, cadmium red, quinacridone red, rose madder, permanent red, alizarin crimson. None of the colors mattered anymore and so I looked at an experiment of sorts, a medium-sized canvas nailed to the wall with whites, zinc white and transparent white and foundation white and Cremnitz white and flake white (lead based as it is). I looked at the surface, which yielded no entry, and tried to imagine something to say about, to, myself or anybody else. I supposed I could claim that the narrative arc of the painting was intentionally contentious, that rather than culminating in a conventional denouement, resolving matters and seeking order, I was employing a highly metaphoric mise-en-scène, so obvious a thing and yet . . . Or perhaps I was saying that the painting was becoming its own wish, the white transforming white into a metaphor that stated its own essential self until the metaphor itself became an essential fact. All of that meant something to me and also nothing at all and so, in a way, I became my own wish, I became a dead artist. Self-pity bred such thinking, I fear. After a failed attempt at working on a new, blank canvas, I returned to the house, sat in the living room, and watched a mindless movie on one of the channels I didn’t know we received. I would have offered a description of the film, but the hand making this story apparently couldn’t come up with it. It was when watching the worst movies that I found anything close to rational clarity, but on that night nothing was clear, as my definition of myself was shifting, changing, and this was disconcerting because until this point, until my confrontation with this possibility of fatherhood, I had never imagined that had any sort of self-definition.

A brief pause here while we address this whole single-fatherraising-a-son story. To say that I raised you is not quite true, as by thirteen I believe we are pretty much completely developed and completely fucked up. After that it’s just a matter of refinement.

Dad, Mom never left us.

Not literally.

How do you mean? Mom lived with you until she died.

You know me. I’m just trying to make a point, to illustrate something, to explicate, demonstrate, elucidate, adorn. Literally, everything I utter is a metaphor, if you know what I’m trying to say.

And what’s that?

Where’s the joy in saying anything flat out?

I am motivated by affections that make me hunger for a connection to some entity. If as a frail man I am too prone to errors of judgment and impression, replacing, as I go, riches and power for what I should better seek, how am I to consider a mind that performs another kind of substitution? I may desire absolute being and imagine that the desire itself is an expression of attainment.

Is this the ranting of an old man?

We will all be old.

Will we?

So it is everywhere and so it will ever be, till all the semen is finally discharged and all the eggs are finally spent or all of everything is reduced to dormant matter in dormant organs on dormant islands, till a talented and zealous architect is hired and all are persuaded to sit around in communities and stare numbly at each other until all rank gives way to reason and reason gives way to feeling and all feeling gives way to simple human need and soldiers stop following orders and the orders stop coming in. Some of us seem to have perished, that is the bleak, woebegone truth, that not even in the blue stillness of death can we be decisive, resolute, unwavering. It was once that life found nourishment, pabulum (and I mean them in whatever ways you can make them mean), in death. If we could have, we would have personified Time, nonspatial as it is, as if in a children’s book, we might have asked it, politely or not, I don’t think it would matter to Time (untroubled as it is), not to run off to ruin.

In this my modest but comfortable Connecticut saltbox house in which I have lived for some thirty-four years, I am reclining in the midcentury Eames lounge chair my Rose bought at a yard sale in Mystic. I cannot see the ocean from my farmhouse, but I know that it is there and yet it gives little if any solace. The bluegrass lawn is long and it is being mown by Gerald, a pleasant Negro man from Hartford, who tells me my bluegrass is rare now. I attend to the care he pays the edges of the yard, swinging his old John Deere riding mower wide to pick up the strip he missed on his last pass. I imagine the tide is going out now and that the constant sound of the ocean is softer, sadder perhaps, the way I feel, but I cannot hear it even when it crashes. I imagine that I am one of those sandy beaches, viewed from a high place, more of me exposed than ever, my sea fleeing for some distant, opposite land, shore, continent, until all is a great silence, a torture of silence. I reflect on my last trip to Paris,
lament
is more like it. I arrived at the Gare du Nord from I can’t remember where. It was a Friday night it had rained all day, leaving the streets shimmering. I knew the taxi ride to the sixth would be long and slow. I was there because I had won some award or other. I asked the driver to stop before we crossed the river, and I got out. Êtes-vous certain? the driver said again and again. I had some sense of where I was. I could see an archway ahead of me, cars bottlenecked and trying to get through, and I believed that through there I would find the Louvre and from there it would be a long walk to the Odéon and my hotel. It was on that long journey along the wet Boulevard Saint-Germain that I finally figured out that I had tumbled into depression, my shoulders aching from my bags, my feet hurting with every step, and yet it was a feeling of freedom, that realization. À quelque chose malheur est bon. I would contemplate this over dinner at Les Éditeurs, the restaurant across the street from my hotel, the walls of which were covered with photographs of writers, I among them, posed seated in a hotel lobby some blocks away. There I would have the gratinée de coquilles St. Jacques, my favorite, and a bottle of wine from the Loire, a sauvignon blanc no doubt. I did arrive at the restaurant. I still had not checked in to my hotel and so I sat with my bags in the chair opposite me at a table meant for two. As it turned out, I instead had a cabernet franc, the color of the wine befitting my mood.

Nat, Nat, Nat, you can’t write this.

Why the hell not? It’s deep, it’s intellectual, it’s cosmopolitan, and it’s timely. What do you mean I can’t write it? I’ve written it.

It’s so unreal. How can this guy be depressed? Look at his life.

Depression is a disease. Besides, you have not gotten to the part where he’s hiding in the lobby of the Four Seasons and has sex with a bellboy.

Really.

I could make the scene about you, I suppose, and I’d have to call it Go Down, Moses.

Are you going to fill it with all sorts of literary allusions?

No, I’m trying to remain authentic here.

Dad?

Son?

I can’t keep up.

Und so weiter.

What?

Ashita wa ashita, kyo wa kyo. It’s Japanese.

That much I gathered. And it means?

A shrug.

I’ll be Murphy again. And I’m sitting with my Leica still, having just looked through the viewfinder and seen the cast and crew of the March on Washington. Nat was smoking a joint rather unabashedly. Charlton Heston was pretending not to know him. John Lewis was stepping forward to give his speech. A pigeon standing on Lincoln’s head did not know whether to fly away or shit. The phone rings and it is Douglas and he says, Donald needs you.

Donald is my patient now and so I cannot leave him there to fade into fat death without treatment. He must at the very least do so while being treated and that is where I come in. And so I walked around the corner and up the block as I have described to the building where the twins reside. The air is rife with the smell of cooking Barcisalproros and I have a sudden fleeting understanding of how Donald has gotten to be all that he is. Still, I am able to control myself and not buy one of the rolls and walk up the one flight of stairs to his apartment. The woman greets me at the door.

What is your name?

Tracy.

Is that the same name you told me last time?

Does it matter?

Not really.

Donald remains in the bed where I left him. I can’t see that he has moved, but I assume, perhaps stupidly, that he must have, at least to get to the toilet, but more likely to roll his rolls downstairs for one or twenty of those ethnically confused, fried rolls. His breathing is in fact labored and I can see why Douglas, who is standing by the window, as if a lookout, was concerned enough to call me.

Are you having pain?

He shakes his head no. I just can’t seem to catch my breath.

He is sweating and I realize that it is overly warm in the room. Would you open the window, please?

This window.

Yes. Please.

The window is opened. The noises of the street come inside. A man yells at another man, Terrence! You’s a bitch, man! But I ain’t yo bitch! The man shouts back. A woman screams, Fuck!

You need to check in to the hospital so I can examine you properly.

No hospitals. People die in hospitals.

People die in beds, too, and yet you’re in one. Okay, you’re asthmatic, I’m pretty sure. I’m going to prescribe an inhaler for you. I’d like to ask that you don’t abuse it. You might try some Claritin as well. Your eyes are red, but I don’t know whether that’s unusual for you. You’re not going to live as long as many people. That’s according to the truth.

Don’t sugarcoat it, Doc.

You’re probably allergic to something. More than likely, this room. Or yourself. Do you take drugs?

You’re prescribing them for me.

No, are you an illegal drug user? Not that I really care, but it might affect what legitimate drugs I think are safe for you.

I don’t take drugs for recreation, if that’s what you’re asking.

It is what I’m asking.

I do not take drugs. He calls to the woman. Tracy, take that prescription from the doc and go pick it up for me.

I’ll do it, Douglas says.

And get some of those chocolate-covered raisins.

You got it.

I’m feeling a little better already.

Helped to open the window.

I won’t go to a hospital.

I can’t force you.

Take a lens, Doc.

And so I do. I take a 135 mm for the Leica I have sitting on my desk at home. It is chrome and beautiful and I feel a thrill as I lift it. I consider for a second turning it down, but the thought gives me a shiver and I let the feeling, not the lens, go.

Ch’ing Yuan could not decide if mountains were mountains and waters were waters. At least he could not commit to a position. Zen is like that. Or it is?

And?

You and I exchange lines of dialogue. Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we have previously agreed, if tacitly. Thereby appears the nature of meaning. It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages. We understand this all too well and yet, and yet—well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam. It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up. As do we all.

All this to say?

A painting may have a back, but no inside.

Where did you find so many stories, Lodovico? I don’t understand.

Of course you don’t, son. That’s what he said to me. Of course you don’t, son. That was all Ariosto got from the good cardinal. Where did you find so many stories, Lodovico?

Freud believed we never give up anything but only exchange one thing for another.

What made you think of that?

I’m not sure. I was sitting here, looking at her belly all big like that, and thinking one day one of us will be talking to our son and the other of us will be gone.

You mean dead.

I mean dead.

That’s true.

And even then, unless I want to live in a fantasy, and I’m not saying I don’t, I’ll have to give you up. Or you’ll have to give me up. But I can’t imagine exchanging you for anything.

A younger woman?

No.

You realize that Freud was full of shit.

You don’t have penis envy?

Not in the least. And why do you think this baby is a boy?

Let’s just say it is a boy. Do we have to name him?

What do you mean, do we have to name him?

Do we have to give him a name? Is there some law requiring that we give him a name? Is there a law that any of us have to have names? What will happen? Will the government come and give him a name?

Why would you do that to a child?

Do what? Save him the ridicule that names cause? If you name him Buck, kids will call him Fuck. If you name him Richard, they’ll call him Dickyard. If you name him Louis, they’ll call him Lois. You can’t mess up ———. I want to think that a name is like a poem. It is not like a practical message that can be considered functional only if we can infer its intended meaning. A name says something, but no one need know whether what is inferred is what was meant. Gone are the days of Cartwrights and Masons and Smiths.

You’ve lost your mind.

And with it, my name.

And I’m supposed to believe you had this conversation with Mom.

Believe what you like. Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me. You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers. Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use
she
and where I use
he
and even why I might have put
she
before
he,
or did not phrase the question as
he
following
she.

She was claiming to be my daughter and I could not refute her by simply saying I was not her father. Perhaps if she had been Chinese, but she was, in fact, racially ambiguous, as so many of us are. For all I know she was Chinese. I know only that I am not Chinese.

The morning came with a silent treatment that I did not believe was deserved. More than that, I did not believe a word of the silent treatment. Sylvia stood in the kitchen preparing breakfast, not an odd thing for anyone else, but the woman had never prepared a breakfast in our thirteen years together. Bacon was releasing its grease into several layers of paper towel and eggs were scrambling in the skillet.

I’ve done nothing wrong, I said.

Of course you haven’t.

Well, what if she is my daughter?

The more the merrier.

No, really, what if she is my daughter?

Then you will be Papa and I will be Sylvia and she will be your child and my stepchild and when she has babies you will be a grandpa and I will be Sylvia. I began to understand some of Sylvia’s anxiety. I don’t mean to be silent. I simply do not know what to say. Do you want her to be your daughter?

She’s not my daughter.

That was not my question.

No, I don’t want her to be my daughter.

And if she is, how will you feel about having said that?

Are you trying to drive me mad? I’ll feel like shit for having thought it, that’s how I feel. But it is how I feel. A person feels what a person feels.

She favors you slightly.

You go from not talking to this?