Private Novelist (19 page)

ALREADY I SUFFER FROM NOSTALGIA
and vain regrets, a personal Anxiety of Influence: How can I maintain cohesiveness and unity without falling into pointless rehashing of subjects and characters already flogged to death? I prefer not to think about chapters earlier than yesterday's, yet I cannot help recalling vaguely an early lament on the attitudes of certain academics toward the ancient Greeks. How I long to rectify my failure to mention the pre-Socratics!

The pre-Socratic philosophers were favorites of Heidegger's and of all those who believe that when the world was new and fresh, ultimate truth lay floundering on the dock, and all you needed was a bucket. Sophisticated language, you see, tends to obscure our view of things-in-themselves, creating lifetimes of thankless labor for the philosophers of today. Luckily some languages are less obscurantist than others. Pre-Socratic Greek, the theory goes, was chock-full of stunningly accurate common nouns. Only German (Heidegger wrote) can hope to rival its ontological precision.

I took a semester-long course in Greek philosophy and a year's seminar on Heidegger. Our education in pre-Socratic philosophy consisted of the following statement:

EVERYTHING IS MADE OF WATER
.

The professor, a big fan of both Heidegger and the pre-Socratics, said this proved that the pre-Socratics were way beyond Einstein. I tried to rediscover the mysterious statement in a book on the pre-Socratics belonging to Zohar's sister and lifted from her by Zohar without permission many years ago, but I failed. Although the book was published in 1981, the primary texts are rendered in a vaguely Mishnaic turn-of-the-century Hebrew that mystifies even Zohar. However, I did find a poem by Empedocles in which the words “Zohar” and “Meyer” both appear.

Of Heidegger I learned, not from the hagiographic class discussions but from reading
Being and Time
in German, that he was an idiot. His etymological curios, so bewitching in translation, flaunt in their transparently moronic original an air of validity on the order of: [Insert here impromptu Heidegger imitation of choice, e.g., “Seattle, we see, is a fine place to sit,” or “The word ‘boring' suggests a drill-like, twisting action; you will recall from our discussion of ‘screwing' . . .” or “Poodles come from puddles”].

I was a little sorry, when Zohar returned home late one night, having attended a department meeting on his way from the airport, that he had missed Meyer's period of activity. Even Meyer's house was already gone from the garbage pile—

American readers may not realize that when I refer to a “garbage pile,” I am speaking of a literal pile of literal garbage sitting in a shallow pit created by its usual means of removal (a municipal combination dump truck and backhoe). Why these piles are allowed to exist, on conspicuous street corners and in the entrances to public parks, it is not in the
purview of this work to say. Leaving its pile, garbage makes a short trip to one of the picturesque “Garbage Mountains” that dot the Israeli skyline. These are conveniently located next to major intersections so that no tourist can miss seeing at least two or three.

—and Meyer sat dimwittedly on a shelf, doing service as a bookend. Zohar threw down his briefcase and embraced me passionately.

“My dear Zohar, you are so cute,” I said.

“Give me a minute. I have to print.” He ran to the computer and inserted a diskette. “My Chicago epic will revolutionize Israeli poetry and chart its development for the next hundred years. Of course, I can't say it's about Chicago, and I'll have to put a naked woman on the cover. I'm thinking of calling it
South Lebanon Nocturnes.
What do you think?”

“That's the name of Elad's new book.”

Zohar fixed me with an angry eye. “Curse him! That scoundrel will pay for this.” From his T-shirt pocket he pulled a half-moon-shaped knife. “Do you know what this is?”

“Darling,” I said, “would you like a chocolate sandwich instead?”

“You don't know? Here's a hint: It's Mongolian—but were you referring to a frozen pita carefully defrosted in a warm toaster oven, split, halved, and stuffed with a generous portion of the ersatz chocolate crème made famous by the native industry of Be'er Sheva in the hallowed year of 1961?” Zohar pulled up a chair and sat down at the kitchen table. “Already I feel my bloodlust melting away. I pardon you, Elad Manor. You will live to write again; your egregious poetry will spatter its blots of shame, which cry out to heaven, upon the Hebrew language without my interference.” He bit the sandwich and turned to me. “Elad Manor,” he added, “owes you his life.”

With that he opened his briefcase and began preparing to teach the next day's music analysis class, pausing only to extort a promise that he will be assigned no more lines of dialogue, especially ones like those above, from now until the end of the novel.

Just then Yigal appeared at the door. In his hand was a page torn from a spiral notebook and marked in a childish, almost unreadable hand. He gave it in silence to Zohar. “‘What the Serial Killer Wants,'” Zohar read aloud.

        
What the Serial Killer Wants

        
The serial killer wants everything to be love.

        
Like an egg, he explains.

        
What isn't love must be eliminated, says

        
The serial killer, filed smooth, like

        
An egg. There is no place, he

        
Says, for what is not sufficiently smooth,

        
Round and

        
White.

“Whoever wrote this,” Zohar added, voluntarily breaking his self-imposed ban on speech, “is perhaps the greatest living Israeli writer.”

“It's Meyer's,” Yigal said.

“Wow, Yigal,” I said, reading over Zohar's shoulder. “It's just like in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,
where Khan says, ‘From hell's heart I stab at thee.' Also it's a little bit like the episode with Nomad.” Zohar had already started typing the poem on his computer.

“I've been turning the house upside down, seeing if there are any more of these,” Yigal said. “But I can't find a thing.
I wish we hadn't lost that little parchment. This can't be the first and last thing he ever wrote, can it? It's so powerful. I never thought of myself as a serial killer before, and I never thought what it meant to demand that Meyer love me.”

“Don't whine,” I said. “You have to learn to let things go.”

“That's your New Age crap,” Yigal said. “It's like telling me I have to learn to say, ‘Who cares?' when everything worth having stands on a foundation of memory, responsibility, and sacrifice.”

Zohar looked up with a pained expression, then went back to typing.

“So what are you doing for Meyer right now?” I asked. “Remembering him? What have you sacrificed, besides what was probably a better mood?”

Yigal grabbed the paper and ran off.

Since my friend David says I should write my memoirs, and Zohar is always saying I should write a book about my parents, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the story of:

The American tale of a father's struggle against adversity is a genre in itself. Generally, following the model of Lear, the father harms no one more than himself, and comes to see his folly only after alienating no one more than his beloved ten-year-old daughter, the light of his life. The story typically begins when the father, a white-collar proletarian who works long hours, is sitting one evening in his La-Z-Boy before the picture window, looking peacefully across the shaded lawn to his vegetable garden/bird feeder and sees the deer/squirrel that will become his nemesis. It ends when the father understands that he must submit to nature just as he already sub
mits to his boss, his wife, and his ten-year-old daughter, the light of his life.

My family did not work quite like that. Also, the challenge facing my father was urgent, practical, and expensive. Our house sat one hundred yards from a narrow but busy country road. Our mail came by Rural Free Delivery to a large mailbox on which I had painted, on one side, a sixteen-inch disappearing gun hurling a projectile and, on the other, a koala. The mailbox bore the rubric “PREPONDERANCE,” which, as our school bus driver often told the assembled children, was a dirty word in Spanish. My father had protested against my mother's naming the house “Banner Acre” in memory of the Banner Chinchilla Ranch on which his father had spent the family's savings in the early 1930s, so we chose the name “Preponderance,” which refers to a mounted cannon's weight at the breech. Once the chinchilla farm folded, my father's family stayed on the land, and it was there, as a child, that my father learned to use dynamite. Dynamite plays no role in the story of the mailbox, but my father and his father used it to blow a barn door quite a few feet into the air while excavating a basement, and many years later, when my father visited the farm again, he felt compelled to point out to the new owners that most of the dynamite was still there, its paper casings nearly rotted away, on a shelf in the garage.

One morning we saw that our mailbox was dented. It is well known that young men like to hang out the windows of cars and hit things with sticks. We fixed it. A week later, it happened again, and then a week after that, and so on, almost every Friday night for months. After the mailbox was knocked right off its post, we asked a sheriff's deputy to sit all night in his car watching it so he could make an arrest.
Strangely, he agreed, but he must have taken a nap, for in the morning, our mailbox was gone.

We bought a new mailbox and started again. The deputy staked it out again. Nothing happened. New players, or at least new equipment, seemed to join the fray: Our mailbox was now regularly peppered with buckshot. But it continued to function, receiving mail, and my father's grief was held somewhat in check, until it vanished completely, post and all. We set the post in concrete, but late that Friday night, we heard a sound, ran outside, and saw that only a hole remained where mailbox number three or number four or whichever it was had stood. At this point it became clear to us that my father had sworn a mighty oath, for, apparently fearing an interruption of mail service, he had mailbox number four or number five on reserve in the garage, and now comes the truly amazing part of the story, which I still remember vividly and viscerally.

The new mailbox went up on a metal post attached to a “deadman,” that is, a pipe buried horizontally several feet below the ground. It went up late that summer night (I remember holding the flashlight), and then the watches began. From that point forward, whoever attempted to put a load of buckshot into the Zinks' mailbox would find himself confronted by a child, aged approximately nine, ten, or eleven (there were three of us), armed with an Instamatic flash camera.

The two-hour shifts were supposed to be carried out from a clump of honeysuckle that covered a rotting stump about thirty feet from the road, but I recall putting myself a little farther out of the line of fire, up the hill a bit, behind an ornamental spruce tree. My usual shift started at midnight in a pastoral silence broken only by the hooting of owls, the creaking of dead pine trees not yet fallen, and the sound of
animals moving about in the underbrush. My feelings of terror were generally low and constant, thus manageable, except when a car came by and seemed to be slowing down, or just before two when my older brother, who took the last shift, would make a game of stalking me.

At some point came the quiet denouement. My father must have submitted. I don't know anymore. When I try to remember how it ended, I think only of how I used to scream when I felt my brother's hand on my shoulder, materializing out of the darkness and silence like a ghost's. I admired him for it. Tarzan himself, I thought, could not have approached more silently.

At home, I was a stranger to the learned helplessness of well-brought-up children. When I felt hungry, I would make a fried bologna sandwich, garlic toast, or a meringue pie. If my parents wanted me, they knew how to find me: My father had installed a buzzer system, and two short beeps was my signal to appear “front and center,” standing at attention in the living room. Breakfast was my responsibility. If I missed the school bus, I would run as fast as I could the three-quarters of a mile to a corner where the bus would pass again after making a loop through a housing tract.

At ten I was already a competent roofer, but my first love was digging foundations. I remember the odd impression things like this made on my classmates. They preferred to play things like “Barbie Is Constipated,” which generally involved putting things in her pants. Mudpies? Is this a joke? I would think, invited to crouch behind a house with a girl I admired in school as some sort of unapproachably cool and popular superwoman.

How I suffered. I suffered constantly. My classmates were
compelled to appear in plays I had written, horrible, tasteless plays. How I long to know that every copy of these plays has been destroyed. I destroyed my own long ago. I am sure everyone despised me. One by one, all my personal deadlines and challenges slipped past, unmet. I could never climb from tree to tree, and as my ninth birthday passed steeped in sin, I realized I would never be a younger saint than the Little Flower of Jesus. I then pinned my hopes on being the Second Coming of Christ, or at least His mother, but realizing the cards were stacked against me, I chose to become instead the first female cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy. To my horror, they began admitting women when I was twelve. A new idol entered my life, giving Tarzan some breathing room: Sarah Bernhardt. I searched for, but could not find in our local library, La Fontaine's fable of the two pigeons, the piece with which she won entrance to the Comédie-Française. I memorized the soliloquies of Hamlet, noting that it would have taken Sarah no more time to do so than it took me just to scan them. I read a biography of a contemporary California genius who escaped to college at age twelve, and noticed that I had nothing whatsoever in common with him—I had not gone to kindergarten prattling of dolomitic marble as he had, nor did I learn the alphabet in my cradle. “Your brother is a genius,” my mother explained. “You are merely very bright.” All my attempts to seem supersmart impressed no one. My idea of learning Latin from a book ended in emotional collapse after I discovered that, in addition to acquiring new vocabulary, I was expected to develop some sneaking suspicion of what noun cases might be. I noticed once and for all that George Gamow's
One, Two, Three . . . Infinity
lost me around page 30, and despite all my efforts to please my mother on the tennis court, I had no backhand, no serve, and an inconsistent forehand. I played
both the fife and the bosun's pipe too poorly to merit a public performance on either. In other words, I realized, I was a fool. School was constant torture—my pants were all too short—and I would sit under my bed reading the Psalms, trying to befriend the God of the Old Testament who would be with me to help as I looked down upon my foes, their brains dashed out against assorted rocks.