Sometimes a Great Notion (75 page)

All this strange and sudden activity seemed even more pregnant with possible deep meanings than Stevens’ poetry, so I switched off my light and lay back to try to plumb the depth of these midnight doings. What was up with all this barefoot roaming? Where were those feet going in that boat at this hour? And, snuggling deeper into my drowse, I was just getting the boots laced onto the feet of my own fantasies—“Perhaps the call told of a great forest fire and Hank and Joe Ben . . . no; too wet; . . . a
flood
, that’s it. Andy has called to say that a terrible forty-caliber rainstorm is strafing the land and splintering the trees and tearing the machinery to shreds!”—when a soft click snapped my eyes back open and a thin needle of light stabbing my bed told me that Viv had turned on her lamp in the room next to mine. . . . Going to read until he gets back, I surmised. This means either he is to be gone only a short time and nothing to worry about, or a long time and maybe she’d better wait up.

I wrestled with my curiosity a few minutes, then got out of bed and pulled on an old army surplus raincoat in lieu of a bathrobe; neither a fitting nor stylish attire to call at a young lady’s room, but it was a choice between the raincoat, the still damp work pants spread out before the heater, or the pegged and pressed slacks hanging in my closet, and somehow the raincoat seemed the least ridiculous of the three.

My choice turned out to be a fortunate one; when she said, “Yes?” to my knock I opened the door to find her in almost complete accord with my apparel: she was on the couch, surrounded by pillows and lamplight and an overcoat even bigger and harsher than mine. And much heavier. A black wool job of obscure extraction; I suspected that the coat had once belonged to old Henry or someone even taller; its folds and fabric were so dark that it lost all outline against itself, becoming a featureless clot of sooty black from which was thrust a gleam of face and two slight white hands holding a paperback novel.

The coincidence gave us a chance to laugh, a chance to cut through the distances that ordinarily take hours to overcome before you can feel anything in common. The raincoats afforded us an in-commonness to start from. “Very pleased to see that you are hip to the latest thing in casual wear,” I told her when our laughter had stopped, “but I feel that you—ah—should see your tailor about the fit,” I said, and shuffled a sneaky yard into the room.

She lifted her arms and studied the overwhelming sleeves. “You think so? Or should I wait till I wash it and see if it shrinks?”

“Yes. Better wait; wouldn’t want it to be too small for you.”

We laughed again and I advanced another dozen inches. “Actually,” she explained, “I do have a housecoat, but I never wear it. I believe it was a gift—it must have been a gift—from Hank for my birthday or something right after I first came out here.”

“It must be a sight to behold, this gift, if you wear that tent instead. . . .”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right. For a housecoat. But, you see . . . I had an aunt that was in a housecoat all the day long, morning to night, never got into anything else till night, when she got fixed up to go to Pueblo or someplace . . . and I promised myself Vivian, honey, when you get big you go nakedy before you run around in a old housecoat!”

“My reason
precisely
,” I replied, “for not wearing a smoking jacket.” I assumed a look of lidded reverie. “Yes. Had an uncle. Same way about
his
dress. Always in this ruddy old tweed, getting cigar ashes in the sherry; smelling up the house; shedding. Damn nuisance.”

“My aunt had terrible breath . . .”

“Oh, my uncle’s breath would sometimes asphyxiate entire rooms full of poor souls unaccustomed to his stench.”

“Did he always leave the sleepy in his eyes?”

“Never removed it; let it build up in the corners of his eyes over the weeks until it was heavy enough to fall out in walnut-sized chunks.”

“I wish we might have got them together, my aunt and this uncle of yours; they sound made for each other, don’t they? Too bad that she couldn’t have married a man like him. With those cigars,” she remarked wistfully. “My aunt had a perfume that she wore that would have gone perfect with his cigars. What will we call your uncle?”

“Uncle Mortique. Mort for short. Your aunt?”

“Her real name was Mabel, but I always called her—to myself, I mean—Maybelline . . . because of all the eye make-up she used.”

“Uncle Mort . . . ? meet Maybelline. Now why don’t you two go on off someplace and get acquainted? There’s good kids . . .”

Sputtering giggles like silly children, we went on to wave the pretended pair out of the room, bade them not hurry back, then—“There goes a real cute couple,”—closed the door behind them triumphantly.

With the little trip ended, we were for a moment without words. I sat down on the big piece of driftwood. Viv closed her paperback. “Well,” I said, “alone at last”—trying to draw out the joke. But this time the response was forced, the giggle much less childlike, and the joke not nearly so silly. Viv and I were fortunate to be able to kid with each other; as with Peters, operating within the limits of humor and make-believe afforded Viv and me opportunities to laugh and make jokes, put each other at ease with pretense; and with this system we could enjoy a relationship without too much worry about commitment. But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything—“Yes,” Viv said, in an attempt to reinforce my attempt, “alone at long last,”—and jokes about anything are now and then
bound
to cut too close to the truth.

I saved us from the fate of hangnail-tending and lint-picking, by remembering what I had come calling to ask about in the first place. The mysterious phone call, she answered, was almost as much a mystery to her as to me. Hank had stuck his head in the door and told her he had to go up to the mill to fish some of his friends and neighbors out of the river, but he hadn’t said who they were or what they were doing at the mill at this hour. I asked if she had any ideas what it was all about. She said no ideas at all. I said it certainly is peculiar. She said it sure is. And I said especially this late at night. And she said and it raining so bad and all. And I said we’ll probably find out in the morning. And she said yes, in the morning, or maybe when Hank and Joby get back. And I said yes. . . .

And after another small silence I said that the weather doesn’t seem to be easing up any. And she said the radio says a new low’s moving down from Canada, be like this another week. And I said that’s sure happy tidings. And she said isn’t it, though . . . ?

And then, we just sat. Wishing we hadn’t been so wasteful with our topics, realizing we had exhausted all the excuses and that if we were to talk it would have to be plunge right into the subject of each other—the only topic left in common—or not talk at all. I stood up, and shuffled backward toward the door, preferring at this point to take the second alternative of not-at-all, but before I could finish my good night Viv took the plunge.

“Lee . . .” She paused a moment to debate something with herself, while she tilted her head and studied me with one blue eye peeking over the coat’s black collar. Then all at once asked me point-blank “. . . what are you doing out here? with all your learning . . . education, out here spending your time wrapping a dull old cable around a dull old log?”

“The cable and the log are not that dull”—I tried to clown my way through—“not when analyzed in their truer, their
deeper
meaning, as sexual symbols. Yas. You must keep it a
secret
, of course, but I am out here on a grant from the Kinsey foundation, doing research for a book on the Castration Complex of the Choker-setter. Fascinating study . . .” But she had asked the question out of serious curiosity and she was waiting for a serious answer.

“No, I mean it, Lee,” she said. “Why are you out here?”

I began racking my brain and kicking my rear for not having anticipated this inevitable question with a good, ready-made, and logical-sounding lie. Damn stupid oversight! And this brain-racking, or the rear-kicking, or both, must have produced an expression of considerable anguish, for Viv’s head immediately straightened out of its questioning tilt and her face filled with sympathy. “Oh. I didn’t mean to ask about something . . . about something you—”

“It’s okay. It’s not that kind of question. It was just that—”

“No; it is that kind of question. I could see it. I’m really sorry, Lee; I do that sometimes without thinking. I had just been wondering why and thought I’d ask; I wasn’t intending to pick at a purple place. . . .”

“Purple place?”

“A bruise, a hurt place in somebody’s past, do you know? Well . . . see, in Rocky Ford, my uncle used to run the jail . . . and he used to tell me that I ought to talk with the prisoners a little when I brought their food because they—he was a good man about things like this—because the poor men felt low enough already without me acting stuck-uppish. Mostly drifters, tramps, drunks; Rocky Ford was a big railroad town once. And he was right, my uncle, that they felt low enough. I would listen to them, their stories and how come they were in jail and what they were aiming to do, and
really
get involved, you see? And then my aunt would see this and come in and sit on my bed at night and tell me that I was maybe fooling those poor men or my uncle, but
she
was onto me.
She
knew what I was, she’d say—whispering, sitting there on my cot in the dark—that I was one of these
carrion-bird
people. Like a magpie or a raven.

Somebody . . . just interested in picking at the purple places in people’s past, she’d say, not at their healthy places, just at their hurts . . . that she was
onto
me and that I’d better watch out.” Viv looked down at her hands for a second. “And a lot of times—I’m still not sure—I thought she was right.” Then back up at me: “Anyway, do you see what I mean? about purple places?”

“No. Yes. I mean yes I see what a purple place is and no you didn’t hit one with your question . . . all right? Why I couldn’t answer, Viv . . . I don’t really know
what
I’m doing out here, fighting dull old logs. But then I didn’t know what I was doing back at school, fighting dull old poems and plays written by dull old Englishmen, either . . . making believe I cared about it all so a committee of dull old professors would authorize me to teach the same rot to more young fellows making believe so more committees would authorize them to teach more fellows, and so on to the last syllables of recorded time. . . . Didn’t it bother you? having your aunt accuse you of preying on the jailbirds?”

“Terribly,” she answered, “for a while, anyway.”

I sat down again on the driftwood. “It’s one of the worst sort of binds you can be put in, you know,” I informed her, in a voice I’m sure must have made me sound as though a record number of similar situations had made me the world’s foremost authority on the resulting hang-ups. “The binds—I mean a bind; the binds sounds like something caused by nitrogen bubbles in your ego—a bind is when you are put in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. In your case, for instance, you were made to feel guilty if you didn’t listen to the prisoners, and guilty if you did.”

She listened patiently but didn’t seem very impressed by my diagnosis. “I felt something like that, I guess,” she said, and smiled, “but you know, it didn’t bother me too long. Because I found out something. I found out little by little that whatever either my aunt or uncle were after me about didn’t really mean anything but that they were onto themselves about it already. That aunt of mine; boy, she used to wear make-up all week long so terrible thick that—well, she started about Wednesday layering it on, and she
never
washed, and every day she slapped down a new layer. Until Sunday. Then on Sunday she kind of
peeled
it off to go to church. And after church she was so holy she’d follow after me for
hours
to see if she could catch me putting on some lipstick so she could make a big fuss.” Viv smiled, remembering. “Boy, she was a case; I used to hope she’d skip a Sunday—sleep through to Monday or something—because I knew two weeks’ worth of make-up and she’d set up like a statue. Especially as hot as it got around there. Boy oh boy.” She shook her head at the memory, smiling. Then yawned and stretched, becoming lanky, her lanky cowgirl arms lengthening up out of the sleeves. Arms still stretched, she said, “Lee, if it really isn’t prying . . . was it always dull, your studies? Or did something happen to take the life out of it?”

I had become so engrossed in the shy outpouring from her world that the sudden cut back to me and mine once more caught me off guard; and I stammered out the first answer that came into my mind. “Yes,” I said. “No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t always dull. Not at first. When I first discovered the worlds that came before our world, other scenes in other times, I thought the discovery so bright and blazing I wanted to read everything ever written about these worlds, in these worlds. Let it teach me, then me teach it to everybody. But the more I read . . . after a while . . . I began to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene . . . Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote
Beowulf
. . . the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot: . . . the same dull old scene . . .”

“What scene is that? I don’t understand.”

“What? Oh, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to come on so jaded. What scene?
This
one, the rain, those geese up there with their hard-luck stories . . . this, this same world. They all tried to do something with it. Dante did his best to build himself a hell because a hell presuppose a heaven. Baudelaire scarfed hashish and looked inside. Nothing there. Nothing but dreams and delusion. They all were driven by the need for something else. But when the drive was over, and the dreaming and the deluding worn out, they all ended up with the same dull old scene. But, look, you see, Viv, they had an advantage with their scene, they had something we’ve lost . . .”