The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (3 page)

 

MELINE

U
NCLE
M
ARTEN
had been a source of endless speculation among the family—our rich, strange relative. The only one of us with any money. Grownups think because they are taller than children their voices carry above their heads, never landing in their ears, but I heard it all, my parents talking about all kinds of things. I heard them when I was supposed to be sleeping and when I was in one room and they were in another or even when I was supposed to be eating and they were drifting about talking from room to room, sure I was too occupied with my food to notice or care about their conversations.

I had only been mildly interested in eavesdropping on my parents' gossip about family members, but now I was glad I had. I was not supposed to have heard my dad telling my mom how Jocelyn's mother thought Uncle Marten had acquired a vulgar amount of money. He said Jocelyn's father thought it wasted on him. My father admitted he was a little jealous and couldn't understand why Marten wouldn't want to help his less fortunate younger brothers, although, naturally, if Marten
had
ever offered him money, he would have returned it in short order. But still, he couldn't help wondering that he didn't even
offer.
It was the lack of the offer that was so curious to him. He knew his brother wasn't stingy. As far as he knew, he didn't hate his family. He hadn't ever even seemed to care about luxury or money. Why then go off alone to some island to sit on all that money like some queer bird on an egg? Who was his brother in the end?

My mother, on the other hand, thought it was lovely that Uncle Marten had so much money. So much money to do with
whatever he liked.
Imagine, Meline! she would say to me while shaking out clean, freshly laundered shirts and smelling them happily. They had just come in off the line on the balcony. She loved folding clothes.
Imagine!
My mother never wanted what other people had. It was like a small burst of exploding light within her all the time, her happy realization of the good things that were. Whether she or someone else had them was never the point for her.

 

MARTEN KNOCKERS

O
NCE
I
SETTLED
into my brand-new completely secluded house, I burned the midnight oil, quite literally sometimes when the power went out, trying to find newness in the world. Trying to find bits and pieces that others hadn't. I have a theory that important things have been left out of the great store of human knowledge and that that is why nothing makes any sense. The great store of human knowledge, after all, is really not so great. What do we really
know?
It's more like a giant jigsaw puzzle with three quarters of the pieces missing from the box. In fact, we're not even sure those pieces are out there anywhere, so when we look, it's really actually pretty futile in a way. That's one way to think about it.

Once when Meline was particularly lucid and wasn't just wandering around with a strange, determined look on her face and lichen in her hair, she asked me what I would think if I found one really good piece of knowledge that made a whole section fit together and make sense. Would I feel I'd done what I'd set out to do with my life? But she didn't get it at all. My dream was to find many, many pieces. It's why I bought the island, it's why I wanted to live alone in such an isolated way. Because without distractions, and with lots of money and no one I had to kowtow to or be obligated to in order to continue my studies, I could study from day to night and night to day again if I wished, and in such a luxury of time and information without the limits of focus I hoped to find many things.

Most of the discoveries made are not very good and they're made by nincompoops in order to advance their careers, so they're made out by the nincompoops themselves to be of much greater import than they are, and then others get on the bandwagon and build their own nincompoopy schemes and theories from the building blocks of these careerists and nothing of any real importance gets added to the store of human knowledge. Wouldn't it be wonderful to discover something without any desire for personal glory, but just to benefit mankind? Of course, mankind probably didn't care about the motive behind the discovery, did it? It just wanted its soup quick and microwavable. Probably, Meline, I told her, the ancients had microwaves. Lots of information has been lost and needs to be rediscovered. If we could dig up everything they knew …

“Who will dig it up—you?” asked Meline.

“Don't be ridiculous. I'm not an archaeologist. No, anything I discover will be new. Maybe it will be lost knowledge rediscovered, but that comes to the same thing. Anyway, the point is to have as much knowledge as possible.”

“And do what with it?” Meline asked.

I just shook my head. I do feel that if you don't already understand scholarship for scholarship's sake there is no point trying to explain it to you. You should take up another hobby. You should knit.

Twice a year I would leave the island for academic conferences. There I would give papers and so get a chance to share what I had found. Disappointingly, my papers always seemed to be better than everyone else's. I realized that I had the luxury of time to do only my research. I didn't have to teach as well. But even so, I would think the other presenters would occasionally come up with
something
better than they did. I always held out hope that I would meet interesting people and not come back to the island confirmed in the mediocrity of academics. But time and time again, I'd arrive home thinking that anyone who has chosen academia has to be too stupid to find his mouth with his fork.

After the last trip I slammed my briefcase onto the table and stormed to bed. Conferences invariably put me in a bad mood. I went so full of expectation, I imagined some kind of idyllic community of scholars sitting together, sharing our enthusiasm, piecing our knowledge into some kind of great quilt, but then I would simply get lost in the muddle of people, the universities and conference centers, the hotels and dinners and cocktail parties and speaking with professors. All those people looking at me funny, thinking I was some kind of mad genius, a Howard Hughes character. And then I got the letters. People wanting money to fund projects, fund careers, fund themselves, fund travel. “Fund off,” I would think to myself, ripping them into shreds.

One professor, wanting research money, buttonholed me at a cocktail party, praising my paper extravagantly. “And you don't even have expertise in this area,” she gushed.

“I live on an island, madame,” I said. “I have a lot of time to think.”

People were, by and large, exasperating.

And now, although my two young nieces behaved very well, I hadn't a clue what to do with them. Even though, between my work and their grief, we hardly saw each other. Of course, I was very upset about the loss of my brothers and I realized that the girls must be even more upset about the loss of their fathers and mothers, but collective mourning is not my style. You do not move to an island if you are fond of group activities. I felt badly, though, really dreadful about what I could only guess they were going through. But beyond that I really did not know what to do for them. And I was ashamed that I did not enjoy having dinner with them, especially because it was the only time I spent with them, if you could call sitting at the same table and reading while eating spending time, which I did because it was certainly more time than I had spent with anyone else in the last twenty years or so. Really, by my standards we were becoming quite intimate.

Finally, after a week, my conscience smote me even about this. I realized it was not a worthy thing to do, to shun my responsibility for their care even to avoiding dinner conversation. That, despite myself, if I was going to take on this newfound responsibility I would have to change. Or at least amend some of my habits. My heartfelt belief was that all meals should be eaten hunched over a desk with your nose in a book and everything you were eating chopped up and eaten out of a bowl with a spoon, the better to scoop it up without having to lift your eyes from the page. I continued to eat breakfast and lunch this way but stopped reading at dinner, although I still brought a book and notebook and pen down with me, hopeful that Meline and Jocelyn would be somehow uninterested in me and I would be granted a reprieve from all this noxious stimulation.

The second fact I had to face about the dinners was that my nieces didn't seem to be enjoying their hot dogs and mac and cheese. Not even when I tried to enliven things by topping the hot dogs with Cheez Whiz. They ate stolidly, uncomplainingly, but occasionally wincing, and I felt ashamed and furtive and muttered things like, “I know I read about this in a magazine somewhere. At least I think I did. What did they call it? Dogs topped with cheese? No, that wasn't it. Sunny dogs! Yes, I think that was the rather perky name for it. Sunny dogs. You put Cheez Whiz on the dogs, the sun so to speak, you see. Oh well,” I said softly, feeling defeated. “Oh well.”

Jocelyn and Meline startled every time I spoke. Then they dropped their eyes, apparently as embarrassed as I was by the hole I was digging for myself.

Worst of all, instead of thinking about the missing element in the unified field theory, I found myself thinking about the food situation the rest of the night. I wasn't used to defeat or to behaving in ways of which I was ashamed or making up stories about reading recipes in magazines. I knew I must amend this immediately and stop making embarrassing gestures to cover up my lethargy about food. Perhaps I ought to start eating better myself. I didn't keep up with health issues. I wasn't as young as I used to be. I'd already lost my hair. Most of it anyway, except for two rows at the sides of my head. If I wasn't going to learn to plan meals and cook, perhaps it was time to let someone else worry about the food. After all, even I knew that hot dogs and mac and cheese were not acceptable dinner fare for all. It was never, not once, served at any of the fancy conference dinners I went to, it wasn't even served at the less fancy rubber chicken dinners. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I'd never seen it served anywhere at all. Not even on planes.

I had gotten the idea from the television one night in a hotel room at a conference in Manitoba when I'd seen a Kraft commercial and a happy mom, a happy suburban
Canadian
mom, who was somehow even
blander,
safer, and more reliable than a happy suburban
American
mom, putting a plate of macaroni and cheese and hot dogs in front of her three tow-haired little boys, and the boys' sheer delight in being served such cheerful suburban bland Canadian food and the mom's pleasure in being able to provide the kind of food that would make her otherwise rather lifeless little brood brim over with excitement. It was so much happiness spilling over everywhere, so much undeserved, mindless contentment from so simple a thing, it was so easy for them, there were no dark skeletons there, here were lives so simple that a plateful of bland foodstuffs initiated an attack of sheer rapture, and I'd thought, yes, that looks easy enough. I can do that. I have not sunk so low into the depths of human despair, the deep endless well of the dark night of the soul, that I cannot be salvaged by a little mac and cheese. I can be my own woman of the house and serve such things to myself. Perhaps to be bland is to be good. Perhaps we are saved not by our passion, our pain, or our search but by our utter indifference to any of that nonsense. Perhaps it is not truth and the struggle to find it but really blandness that will set us free. Perhaps I should join their lifeless but utterly contented party. At least, when all's said and done, with a case of mac and cheese and a freezer full of hot dogs, I will never have to cook.

This had come on the depressing heels of a talk one of my fellow conferencers had had with me at another interminable cocktail party when she was trying to convince me in a coquettish way that what I needed was a woman to share the island with. I had mistakenly told her I lived alone there, and she had picked up the ball and run, in my consideration, sadly afoul with it. A woman to iron my shirts, she'd said, pointedly staring at what peeked out from beneath my wool sports coat, for I like cotton shirts and I don't know how to iron or want to learn and have always figured shirts aren't really visible under a jacket and tie anyway, so I arrived everywhere sadly wrinkled. Since most of my fellow academics are similarly wrinkled, perhaps not so badly, but certainly not crisp and polished, I never felt particularly noticeable until this woman suggested that I'd be less wrinkled if I married. I bought drip-dry shirts after that. I didn't like them as well, they weren't as comfortable, but they didn't invite comment. Then she said I must have someone to cook for me, too.

“You women!” I sputtered indignantly. “You spend half the time at conferences banding together and sharing information about chilly climates. How you're done out of your due at your place of work, how the men still say ‘he' when they should say ‘he or she' and on and on, and then when it comes to the cocktail party you get drunk and revert to something your mothers would be ashamed of, telling someone that he needs someone to cook for him. Well, I am astounded. Astounded and astonished. Astonished and astounded!” And then I temporarily forgot her altogether as I pondered the difference between astonishment and astoundedment. Astonished was perhaps just surprised while astounded implied some kind of moral judgment attached. A disapproving version of astonished. You could be happily astonished but could you be happily astounded? I didn't think so.

This little outburst, as you can imagine, even if I hadn't drifted off in thought as if the woman simply weren't there, had cut the conversation short or, at any rate, shorter. This new tack in the conversation had left her breathless and appalled but it had upset me far more. I didn't exactly panic, but it did cause me a certain amount of unease. I did not want to become like those people who were found dead under twenty years' worth of old newspapers. I did not want to start collecting cats and then slide down the slippery slope of just opening another tin of cat food for myself in the evening. I didn't feel better until I saw the Kraft commercial and realized here was a meal I could make and eat, to be as nurtured and nurturing as the tow-headed brood and their no doubt overly involved mother. And that, menu wise, was that.