Axel Pimletz is so infrequently at his best in the morning he couldn’t place it if it stared back at him after a shave. Still, usually, it takes him a couple hours to at least reach his norm. Even he will concede this. Most mornings, it is all Pimletz can do to peel himself from bed, stumble into the shower, curse the clogged drain that leaves him wading by the time he is through, towel off, find some outfit that isn’t too hideous or too like what he wore the previous day, reach into the fridge for the bowl of cereal he poured and milked the night before (he likes his Frosted Flakes sogged, substantially), and depart on his walk from the mouth of Storrow Drive, through Back Bay, across the Common, past the blink of theater and red light districts, and on to the dilapidated Record-Transcript building. When he arrives, he is still not there. Not necessarily. Not yet.
On this morning, it takes longer than usual for Pimletz to achieve speed. There are reasons. First, he’d forgotten to replenish his Flakes—yesterday, after work—something that had been on the internal To Do list he is always misplacing, so he must leave the house hungry, and without roar. Second, he can’t find a reasonable-looking tie with enough brown in it to suggest anything at all of his too-brown slacks and less-brown sports coat, the miscalculations in style to which he’d earlier committed. Third, it’s raining, hard, second day running, and Pimletz’s feeble umbrella proves far more efficient at inverting itself against the accompanying hard wind than at keeping him dry.
Fourth, and most troubling, he gets to his desk and discovers no one has died. Well, not no one, exactly, but no one good. Better, no one good enough for the Record-Transcript. Think of it: not a single newsworthy human being has perished in the hours since yesterday’s routine. This happens, sometimes, but it is never a welcome thing, at least not where Pimletz and his already brittle sense of self-worth are concerned. It stops him dead, leaves him wondering what he’s doing, what he’s done, what’s expected. This very public not having anything to do strips him of all identity and purpose, or any semblance he’s been able to manage of either, and, for a moment, he allows himself to wonder if anyone would notice if he slipped out the back door and took up thumb wrestling. When he is faced with nothing to do and an entire working day in which not to do it, it is too much for him. He can’t bear it. In truth, Pimletz would rather have something not to do than nothing to do at all, so he looks to pull some poor soul from the paid death notices, some belovedwife-lovingmotheradoredgrandmothercherishedfriend, and set up her passing for the complete treatment. Something not to do.
Yes. Here. Sylvia Fleishmann. Arlington. Died in her sleep on the night of her one hundredth birthday after a brief illness. Mourned, for eight dollars an agate line, by her temple sisterhood, the B’nai B’rith, her adoring grandchildren, and an organization seeking a cure for juvenile diabetes. Four ads. Not bad. One for each quarter-century—Pimletz does the math again—and one of them for pretty decent money. Normally, according to the newspaper’s archaic guidelines for full-blown obituary consideration (a dedicated career; noted service or contribution to the community; historic, unusual, or otherwise celebrated accomplishments), the Sylvia Fleishmanns of greater Boston would be passed over by the Axel Pimletzes, even with their four paid death notices, but her fleeting status as a centenarian combines with her fortuitous timing and vaults her into consideration. If it’s good enough for Willard Scott, it’s good enough for the Record-Transcript. Plus, there’s no one else.
Okay, so the lady is only worth a couple column inches, one hundred years or no. Pimletz, on hold with a spokesperson from Arlington Pines, the nursing home where Sylvia Fleishmann did her passing, works his lead in his head. He does this without thinking. Something about a finish line, oddly. A race, a finish line. All the time in the world, and this is what he comes up with. He fixes on the hackneyed image, likes the picture he gets of a noble old lady breaking the tape at the end of a long ordeal, maybe in a wheelchair, maybe with a walker, fists punched out or high in last-gasped exultation. Twenty years cranking the same obits for the same people, give or take, and now it has come to this. It’s like a New Yorker cartoon, the way Pimletz figures it. As he labors to transform this picture of a dead woman he has never seen and knows nothing real about into his own flat prose, he reminds himself why he has never moved from his place of indistinction at the newspaper: he writes like a greeting card. That, and he’s got the instincts of plankton.
“Any hobbies?” Pimletz tries, when the Arlington Pines person returns. If he had a dollar for every time he’s asked the same of countless family members or nursing home spokesfolks, he’d have enough, say, to reupholster the salvaged armchair in his living room.
“Like what?” he gets back.
“Like, did she have any hobbies? Special interests? What kinds of things did she enjoy?” These follow-ups, too, are part of the drill, and they tumble from Pimletz’s chapped lips as if they know the way.
“Well, most of our clients are involved in our crafts program,” the woman on the other end reports, cheerfully. “We have a very talented local artist, comes in two times a week. That the kind of thing you’re looking for? I believe Mrs. Fleishmann was active in that.”
“How active is active?”
Pimletz gets an ear about Sylvia Fleishmann’s fondness for crazy-colored pot holders—she liked to spell crazy with a K, the spokesperson tells. Recently, Sylvia Fleishmann fashioned a reasonable likeness of the South Fork ranch from the television show Dallas out of popsicle sticks and Lincoln Logs, with pápier mâché landscaping. Also recently, she had been helping to restore some of the antique quilts donated or otherwise discarded to the Pines by some of the other clients and their families.
He decides to go with the quilts and, going, loses the piece at the top about the finish line. Somehow, staring back at him in dull green letters from the dusty screen of his video display terminal, the notion of poor Sylvia Fleishmann, done up like Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies, breaking some badly metaphored tape of life and then dropping dead in front of a viewing stand of up-next Arlington Pines clients, seems to Pimletz not the way to go. He knows this much. He plays it straight, clean: cause of death, the quilts, lifelong interests, funeral arrangements, surviving family. Maybe he can get Volpe to dress it up with a picture; the woman at the nursing home said this Sylvia Fleishmann was stunning. Her word. Said they’ve got a shot of her posed next to the popsicle stick ranch, taken for the nursing home newsletter, shouldn’t be any trouble to pinch it for a couple hours.
Pimletz slugs his copy—“OBIT.SF”—and sends it off to be digested by the Record-Transcript’s computer system. That’s the way it registers for the once-again-resting Pimletz, like he’s feeding the institution that in turn feeds him. True, all he’s got to dispense are crumbs, but this is how it translates.
It’s been about a dozen years since management finally acknowledged the technological revolutions of the computer age, nearly all of which remain a mystery to Pimletz, who goes through his motions, still, as if for the first time. He consults his user’s guide and punches out the appropriate commands on his keyboard, but he’s got no real idea what happens to his copy when it leaves his screen. It disappears, for him. He knows it winds up on Volpe’s screen, and at the copy desk, and, eventually, enchantedly, in the newspaper, toward the back of the Metro section, where it looks vaguely familiar, like a distant cousin to what he’d first written, but he doesn’t know where it goes in between.
When he started out, whenever the hell that was, he’d bang out his stories on a manual typewriter on special “six-plicate” paper. What Pimletz misses most about those days is the way he’d finish a take, pull it from the carriage with grand importance like everyone else, rip the sheets from their perforated tabs, and crumple the fallen carbons, ink-side down. He’d pile up this great mound of fallen carbon balls. After the last take, he’d spread out his six-sheets and start collating, happy for the chance to attach some overwrought public significance to what he’d just done. Then he’d hold up his hands like a surgeon after a scrub and march significantly to the Men’s to see about the carbon stains on his fingers.
Now all that’s left for him to do is beam his copy across the newsroom—zip!—with no hard proof he’s done anything at all, no smudge on his hands, no way to remind Hamlin and the rest of his abutting, and occasionally onlooking, colleagues that he does, in fact, have a role at the newspaper and that he does, also occasionally, play at it. Now, for appearances, he’s developed this flowery final key stroke (a poke, really), which he displays every time he logs off his computer, or feeds his copy to the hungry newspaper, or punctuates an uncommon lead, and which he hopes signals similar heat and relevance to the rest of the newsroom, even though he knows it is not the same and that it probably does not. Now, for Pimletz, it’s his word against theirs, and the only time he gets to hold up his hands like a surgeon after a scrub is in front of his own mirror, alone, working to imperfection the bad Ed Sullivan impression he will never share.
Resting, Pimletz loses himself in the rhythms of the newsroom. He takes it all in, but not to where it actually might register. There is a dull hum, not emerging from any one place or any group of places, but rather from the coalescing of activity around the large room. For Pimletz, there is no single, identifiable noise, just an insistent purr, like an engine. It is the noise of friction, activity, consequence. He likes to think he contributes in some important way to the general newsroom purring, but, as he checks himself, he realizes he is not making any noise at all. Even if his thinking made noise, he’d be quiet. He’s done for the day, and what he’s done has hardly mattered. He shuffles some papers in a show of consequence and logs on the in-house Lotus Notes bulletin board to see if there are any messages for him. It is late morning—Jesus, he only killed a couple hours with this Fleishmann obit!—maybe someone’s wondering if he’s free for lunch. Scrolling, he thinks, look busy, look busy, look busy.
Bill, in Classifieds, is selling his x-country ski machine. Cheap.
There’s an office pool seeking wagers on whether Hillary Clinton will wind up in Westchester or Manhattan. (It looks like Long Island is pretty much out of the running.)
And here’s one lingering from a few years back: the sports department peddling “Free Jack Clark!” bumper stickers—three bucks each, two for five—looking to raise funds for its annual bender on the back of the financially and otherwise troubled former Red Sox slugger who squandered both his personal fortune and his ability to hit a baseball in the same season. No one thinks to delete the posting, just as no one would think to display the bumper sticker anymore.
Pimletz scans the mess of unsigned drivel and mock headlines—HONK IF YOU LIKE SEXUAL HARASSMENT, BABE; NICE WEATHER WE’RE HAVING; THE CELTICS DRAFTED WHO?—until the screen finally flashes with a bulletin for him: “Hey, Axel. My dog died.”
He gets this shit all the time. He looks up from his screen and sees Hamlin, next desk over, doubled up, laughing. Fucker doesn’t even have a dog.
“He have any hobbies?” Pimletz hollers, playing along.
“What hobbies?” Hamlin shouts back.
“Like, you know, hobbies. What were his interests?”
Hamlin: “He liked to lick his own balls. That a hobby? That something you can use?”
Here is Norman Wood, rail-thin, crew-cutted, twenty-three, smoking Camels, deconstructing The Godfather, lost in the swirl of making movies. Well, okay, he’s not exactly lost and he’s not exactly making any movies, but he is in the swirl. Here, in one of the screening rooms at New York University, he gets to sit in the dark with a dozen other pale and darkly dressed students and trade bombastic, overblown comments on what the people at NYU like to call the literature of the screen. He listens with a detached importance as the professor, a smallish man with smallish credits, offers his take on the American family, as seen through the eyes of Francis Ford Coppola.
The Godfather, to this smallish man, is all about the strength of family to withstand the disintegration of society. Anyway, that’s what registers for Norman. He can’t concentrate. He can’t get past the way this guy stops and starts the picture to make his various points, the way he talks over the scenes to narrate what he thinks is really going on. This is where Francis does this, he tells, and here you can see Francis is trying to say that. He calls him Francis.
About the only things for Norman to get off on are that he is here at all—in film school, about to matter—and that they let him smoke. Everywhere else in Manhattan, you can’t watch movies and smoke at the same time, at least not in a theater, but Norman lives to smoke in theaters, to look away from the screen at odd moments and catch the swirls of second-hand smoke as they pass through the light from the projector. He loves how, sometimes, an image from the film catches a cloud of smoke in such a way that he can actually see the light patterns filtered through the air above his head. It is, he thinks, an apparition of an apparition, the once-removal of an image that is already once-removed. It is the way movies were meant to be seen, the way he watched his father watch the rough cuts of his pictures back at the Woodman’s house in the Hills.
The Godfather he can do without. It’s not like it held any kind of defining screen moment for him, and he can do without the stopping and starting and dissecting the thing to its component parts. It’s just a picture, and, anyway, he knows more about it than this smallish man. Probably, generally, he knows more about making pictures, about reaching into the heart of a purely American darkness and finding an essence of humanity and compassion and artifice and whatever the hell else it is a good movie can help you find. Absolutely, he knows movies. He’s lived movies. Shit, he grew up in better screening rooms than this.
The smallish man interrupts the movie again, only this time to engage in whispered conversation with one of the department secretaries, who brings so much light into the room with her that the image on the screen is nearly washed out.
The professor looks up from his whispering and calls out to Norman. “Mr. Wood,” he says. “It seems you have a phone call.” He holds out a pink While You Were Out message slip.
“It’s his agent,” mocks Mona, an androgynous looking friend of Norman’s, whose pictures are to the literature of the screen what Woody Allen is to estrogen. “He’s got Warners on the line with a three-picture deal.”
Everyone laughs but the smallish professor, who looks at his watch and makes notes on the legal pad resting on his angled podium. Norman collects his backpack and his smokes and his previously owned bomber jacket and walks to the front of the room to retrieve the message slip. Then he crosses to the bin by the door, where the professor has his students check their cell phones and pagers, switched off to avoid interruptions such as these. He grabs his phone from the loose pile and switches it back on, and, as he leaves the screening room and the picture starts back up, he can see the professor’s shadow in the corner of the screen. He’s gesturing toward James Caan’s elbow, only his entire shadow is about the size of James Caan’s elbow, and the effect reminds Norman of George C. Scott standing in front of that giant American flag in Patton. The man is dwarfed by the images on the screen, and Norman leaves the room thinking how cool it is to get a phone call in the middle of class, to give the appearance of some business cooking on the coast, to circumvent the professor’s ridiculous cell phone check, to have a chance to put such a small man in an even smaller place.
News of Terence Wood’s death stops the presses. Literally. Figuratively. And every which way, besides. Pimletz returns from his hard-boiled eggs and chocolate milk at the P&S Lunch and smells that something has happened. Place gets that way sometimes. A strange stillness develops underneath the purr of activity. He wills himself into it. It permeates the vast room, this strange stillness, and the people inside it, the way it did when Reagan was shot, when the stock market dropped five hundred points, when the shuttle exploded with that teacher on board. Not like when Pimletz wakes to a piece of news after the bulletin has a chance to establish itself. Those times, the story is already written, the drama complete. The weird hush comes in the space between tragedy and deadline. Someone, maybe Hamlin, told Pimletz that during the San Francisco earthquake, when the news hit, there was a pocket of about ten, fifteen minutes during which everyone sat frozen in front of CNN and ABC, waiting for pictures. It got to where you could walk into the newsroom from the outside, unconnected, and right away know something was going on. It was like a visceral thing. Pimletz was home, waiting on the World Series, but this was what he was told.
Today, back from his early lunch, Pimletz’s nose for news tells him he is about to be floored. There, over by the assignment desk, six or seven reporters are huddled around a small television. Something’s definitely going on. Most of the desks surrounding Pimletz’s are empty, their monitors abandoned between thoughts, the dull green from the letters of their not-saved stories coating his corner of the newsroom with an uncertain light. He rests his still-warm Warburton’s muffin—jumbo oat cranberry crunch—on his desk and inches toward the television huddle to see what the matter is.
“Got something for you,” Volpe announces, approaching the same huddle.
Pimletz, startled, looks over his shoulder to see who’s got what for whom. Nothing’s ever for him.
“Axel,” Volpe says.
“Me?”
“You.”
Pimletz shrugs. “Okay, what? What’s up?”
“Terence Wood.”
“Terence Wood, the actor?”
“No, ass wipe. Terence Wood, the dry cleaner. We’re holding the front page for Terence Wood, the fucking dry cleaner.”
Pimletz wonders about the ass wipe. He wonders whether it’s just newspaper talk, the kind he’s been fielding for most of the last twenty years, or if maybe Hamlin has spread the word about his underpants. And why did he have to mention dry cleaner? Where did that come from? Volpe knows, Pimletz determines. He knows. Shit. Then he thinks, okay, wait, it’s nothing, right? The ass wipe and dry cleaner business, it’s just nothing. Just expressions. I’m being paranoid. You know, that’s just the way Volpe talks. I’ve heard him talk that way. Probably he just thinks I’m an ass wipe. Good.
“Front page?” he finally says, up from wondering. “Jesus, what happened?”
“He’s dead, that’s what happened.” Volpe fires a Marlboro Light, shakes the match onto the floor, in the direction of Sam Haskins, the health and science reporter who has been petitioning to declare the Record-Transcript newsroom a smoke-free environment. “Of course he’s dead. Why the hell else you think I’m talking to you? Car spun out over some cliff in yesterday’s storm.”
“Here?” Pimletz can’t think where Terence Wood might have found a cliff in downtown Boston. He hears it back and he thinks, okay, ass wipe, stupid question. Take it back, take it back.
Volpe: “Up in Maine. Acadia. National Park Police found his car this morning. What was left of it. Tide ran out along those rocks and cliffs and there it was. Still looking for the body.”
A million thoughts queue for Pimletz’s attention. Maine. Park police. What kind of car? What else did they find? How can they be sure he’s dead without a body? Why Maine? Plus, what about that movie Terence Wood was supposed to be making? Scorcese, Tarantino, one of those guys. De Niro. Jessica Lange. He definitely remembers reading about this somewhere. “I can be up there this afternoon?” he says hopefully, asking, sort of, making room for what he has to do. “I’ve got a car I could use.” He’s thinking maybe they were shooting this Tarantino movie up in Maine, maybe he’ll get to meet Jessica Lange out of the deal.
“What, up there?” Volpe says. “You’re here. I want you here. I’ve got someone else on the story.”
“Who?” Again, Pimletz thinks, take it back. Stupid question.
“Fuck do you care, who?” Volpe says, flat. “Someone else. Not you. You, you’re on the straight obit.”
“With no body?” Pimletz says, making sure. To the best of his knowledge, which hardly ranks up there with the best of anyone else’s, the Record-Transcript has never run an obituary without a confirmed death. This has been discussed, from time to time. “It’s an obituary you want, or something else?”
“Obit, tribute, fuck do I care what you call it?” Volpe barks. “Fifty inches. Life story. First break. Academy Awards. That Playboy interview he did, couple years back, made all the headlines. Talk to his wives, his kid, some Hollywood shits. The works.” He snuffs his butt under his shoe and kicks the flattened filter toward Haskins. “And lots of local color. We’re his hometown paper. Don’t let those fuckers at the Times beat us on this one.”
“He’s from here?” Pimletz marvels. Everything is news to him.
“He’s from here.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“And Maine?” Pimletz tries. “Why Maine?”
“Fuck do I know?” Volpe snarls. “Maine.”
“Oh,” Pimletz says. “Good. Good to know.” He nearly puts pencil to scalp with this mental note.
“Check the morgue,” Volpe says, turning for his office. “Check the live file. We should have something.”
With Volpe’s leaving, Sam Haskins, a large man with delicate features, reaches into his center desk drawer and pulls out a plastic sandwich bag, zip-locked, from which he removes a small pair of tweezers. Then he stoops—a swooping kind of stoop, given his size and the statement he wishes to attach to the motion—pinches at Volpe’s kicked butt with his tweezers, and walks the offending filter to the garbage can across the room. He does this with a dozen sets of eyes on him, unruffled. Then he returns the tweezers to the bag, the zip to the lock, and the bag to his center desk drawer. Then he makes for the Men’s to wash up.
Pimletz looks on and doesn’t get how there’s a guy like that, just a couple desks over, and Hamlin still beats the shit out of him.
The newspaper’s live file—banked obituaries of still-breathing heads of state, politicians, business leaders, aging movie stars, retired athletes, and anyone else rich or famous enough that their sudden but increasingly likely death might spark a scramble for biographical material—is stored in its computer system and retrieved by punching in the command “NOT YET,” followed by the first three letters of the subject’s last name. The drill, on slow days, is that Pimletz is supposed to fill at least some of his down time scanning magazine features, press kits, and unauthorized biographies for thumbnail life stories and anecdotal material, which he then plugs into working obituaries on notables of his choosing. Just yesterday, flipping through a back Vanity Fair, he noticed something interesting on Ross Perot and dropped it into the live file under “PER.” Once, from scratch and from memory, he started a file on Fay Vincent after learning that the former commissioner of baseball was facing tricky back surgery and reconsidering the fact that the guy walked around with a cane. He even got one going on Macauley Culkin, the kid star from those first Home Alone movies, after catching an interview on Good Morning America or someplace, couple months back, and deciding the kid had an attitude.
NOT YET, but SOMEDAY. . . .
Always, compiling these epitaphs-in-progress, Pimletz is filled with a dizzying power. It is a kind of voodoo, he thinks, the way he writes off the rich and famous and still-breathing while his innocent subjects are left to meander through the balance of their lives unaware. He imagines what Barbara Walters would say if she knew her passing would invoke a graph in one of the Boston papers on her turn as a “Today Girl,” dressed in a bunny suit for a Playboy feature, or if Boston Pops conductor John Williams had any idea his leave-taking would be accompanied by a sordid anecdote from the set of Steven Spielberg’s forgotten opus, 1941.
It is a special thrill for Pimletz, a wonder, knowing something so intimate about these beautiful people, something so benignly spectacular. Sometimes, it is all he can do to keep from calling Heather Locklear (or Larry Bird, or Boston University President John Silber) and letting loose the childish taunt, “I know something you don’t know,” sing-song, although it would also be more than he could do to get someone like Heather Locklear on the phone.
For the longest time, the running joke he played with himself was to change the lead on Rose Kennedy’s file. The thing was mostly written when he signed on at the paper, but he kept topping it with one cause of death after another. Falling safe. Drive-by shooting. Scared to death by Dr. Kevorkian. It was, for a time, his daily amusement, and he wondered if there maybe wasn’t a board game in here somewhere, on the dovetailing theories that others might find some challenge in his callously trivial pursuit, and that he might as well make some money from it.
When Rose Kennedy finally expired in her sleep of natural causes, Pimletz couldn’t bring himself to write the straight lead. Hamlin had to do it for him because, for Pimletz, the point wasn’t at all how Rose Kennedy died, but that she finally did, and that he’d have to come up with some other way to pass the time.
He’s back to the live file, looking to get himself going. Ah. There, right after Kerry Wood, the Chicago Cubs pitching phenom, he finds what he’s looking for. Wood, Terence Upton (b. March 2, 1932; Boston, Massachusetts)—American film actor. Then he scans from Wood on down to Mort Zuckerman to measure the file, study his output, kill time. Back to Wood. There’re only about three screens of information on this guy, most of it pulled from a People cover timed to promote the actor’s last relevant effort, but some of the entries show evidence of Pimletz’s tired hand:
see Tonight Show appearance, 12/76, for comments on Vail run-in with Pres. Ford
note T.V. spots for some potato chip with Redskins running back John Riggins, early 1980s
panel participant, “Reinventing Hollywood: Will Big Budgets Kill American Cinema?” New York University Film School, spring, 1984, transcript available
Always, Pimletz’s notes reflect a resigned shorthand, as if he were merely going through the motions of his job and never planning to linger at the obit desk long enough to have to work from his abbreviated entries. He does what he has to do, barely, but now that he is here, on deadline, he realizes it is not enough. This Wood file is a sorry example. There is reference to some recent out-of-town articles, including one on the dedication of a plaque outside the actor’s boyhood home on Beacon Hill, and one profiling his first wife, Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven, who apparently resettled in Nashua, where she opened a rug cleaning business with her second husband. But there are no corresponding dates or publications to help Pimletz now locate the real deal. There is also mention of an unauthorized biography by a British journalist, who claimed to hold evidence linking the actor to quashed bigamy charges in the state of New Hampshire, but there is no reference to the book’s title, or author, or publisher.
Of course, he could look these things up like a real journalist, but he rides himself for letting what was once at hand slip so haphazardly away. The way Pimletz works, or chooses not to, this is hardly enough to go on.
Petra Wood has got her phones rigged to sound an old-fashioned bell ring—two short bursts and a pause, two short bursts and a pause, just like in the old movies. The only problem with this ringing is the way the clang invades her sleep and jolts her awake. The peals are like fire drills to her at these times, but, for the rest of her day, she finds them calming and not nearly so intrusive. She even has the antiquated handset that looks like a dolled-up parenthesis to go along with the ring.
It is 10:30, California time, when the first two short rings jolt Petra Wood awake, and it takes her a moment to focus. By the time the second bursts clang through, she has noticed the clock; calculated there are still another two hours of sleep to be had before Wilton, her personal trainer, arrives for their early afternoon run; peered through her taupe mini-blinds to see what the day was doing; kicked the remote control from her quilted covers to the pickled wooden floor; and watched helplessly as the two triple-A batteries came loose and rolled to the air vent by her nightstand. She even found time in the pause between rings to worry how she might retrieve the batteries should they roll into the duct, if maybe she could just leave them there without a problem, or, relatedly, if perhaps the things were too thick to fit through the narrow openings. She abandoned these lines when one of the batteries stopped short and the other came to rest nearly perpendicular to the vent slats. All of this, along with another mess of thoughts having mostly to do with the way her mind races while the rest of her is too numb to move, and how later, when she’s fully awake, her thinking will slow to its more accustomed pace, before the third set of rings. “What?” she says, picking up finally. “What?”
“I have news.”
Her lawyer, she processes. In New York. With news. “Good or bad?” she says.
“Depends,” says this guy, Andrew somebody, she can never remember his name. Smith. Zalaznik. Merlinson. Something. He’s been handling her divorce for six months, just about, and she still can’t get it straight. “Shall I spoon it out,” this Andrew guy says, “or do you want it all at once?”
“That depends, too.”
“It’s Terence,” the lawyer says. “I’m afraid he’s had a terrible accident.” He hates being the messenger on a call like this, wishes someone would come up with a way for him to deliver his news whole, all at once. Like a “send” button on a fax machine. Here. Here is everything I know.
“Terrible terrible?” she asks, anxious for the rest of it.
“Pretty terrible. There was a bad rain. Car apparently skidded off a cliff up by the house. They don’t think he made it.”
Petra Wood doesn’t understand this Andrew guy’s hand-holding, the effort he’s making to ease her into what he has to say. “They don’t think he made what?” she tries. Reservations? “What don’t they think he made?”
“It,” he repeats, presumably in clarification. And then, for emphasis, “It. You know, they don’t think he made it. They haven’t found his body, but they’re pretty sure he couldn’t survive such a crash.”
There. The part about his body is Pet’s first hard clue that something is wrong, that this call is anything more than another in a long series of updates on a hoped-for divorce settlement with her estranged husband. Now, with this body business, she’s all over the place in her thoughts. First she’s thinking, You know, okay, so Wood banged up the car a little bit. Not the first time. And then she’s thinking about the cliffs up in Maine and it’s still not registering. And then, inexorably, she knows. “When?” she says.
“Last night. Late, I think. Not really sure. Got the call just now.”
“Shit.” She falls back against her pillows, lets the phone drop to her chest. The truth of the moment nearly overwhelms her, but not to where she is lost in it. She is whelmed, just. A part of her is very definitely here, focused, thinking, you know, okay, this thing happened, it’s a happened thing. She worries that, in her thinking, she has not made room to feel anything, that she has given these instants over to simply absorbing this new piece of information, that she is not letting it touch her in any substantive way. She is not transformed by the horrible news the way she thinks perhaps she should be. Then again, she catches, she must be feeling something because she is momentarily paralyzed, unable to move or think clearly. Wood, she thinks. Her Wood. She goes from hating him to wanting him back, desperately, in the time it takes for Andrew Somebody to deliver the news.
Petra Wood is swallowed up by her pillows and by the thought of her very nearly ex-husband tumbling on down to the stormy sea. She wonders, briefly, what it was like for him in those last moments—if he was conscious or afraid, if he called out to her or to someone else, if a lifetime of memories truly were unfurled before him or if his thoughts were blank, if he had the radio on, if he’d been drinking—and, in her wondering, she fixes on a vision of Mel Brooks in that Hitchcock spoof (what the hell was that movie called?.) He’s falling backward, spinning, flailing in a crazy, swirling vortex, screaming madly, almost comically, only in Petra’s wild imaginings, Mel Brooks has become her Wood. The mad screams have exaggerated to where they are now joyous shouts of “geronimo!” and “look out below!” and there is no end to his falling.
Wood.
“Petra, I’m sorry,” Andrew says, thinking that his client is still listening at the other end. “I know how upsetting this must be for you.”
“High Anxiety,” Petra says, remembering the movie, only the phone is by now buried beneath the linens and all her attorney can hear is the rustling of sheets as she rolls from her bed and thumps to the floor.
“Petra?” he says, “Pet?” but he gets back nothing.
Petra Wood, whelmed and cold and naked on the pickled wooden floor, crawls frantically to the air vent by her nightstand and fumbles for the batteries. It is an effort for her to pinch the things from their position against the metal duct, but she eventually manages. Then she looks under the bed, also frantically, for the kicked remote, and when she finds it, she struggles to fit the batteries into the trap and line them up against the vague markings etched into the black plastic, copper tops opposite. This, too, is an effort, and when she’s satisfied with it, she spins on her seat and points the empowered remote to the television at the foot of her bed. She holds it out like a magic wand, a divining rod, only she can’t get the thing to work. She presses every button. Then she spins the batteries in their trap and tries again. Then she holds the remote in her right hand and slaps it crisp against the palm of her left, over and over. Then she bangs it on the floor. Sometimes this helps.
In her deliberate frenzy, her thoughts arrive on the possibility that maybe this Andrew guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, maybe he didn’t even call, maybe she dreamed his call and she’s only now waking from her nightmare. Maybe the ugliness over the divorce—and it has gotten pretty ugly—has left her feeling sentimental and willing to forgive the six or seven times she knows about Wood dipping his cock into any warm hole he could find. (And those are only the times she knows about!) Or, okay, he did call, the lawyer did call, there was very definitely a call, yes, but maybe it was just a wrong number, some other piece of bad news meant for someone else.
There, the television flashes on, and, for an instant, the screen confirms her frantic imaginings. She’s landed on one of those mid-morning talk shows with bouncy supermarket music and an enthusiastic audience and a jump-suited blonde looking far too earnest for her day part. Today’s topic quickly reveals itself: cosmetic mastectomies, something Petra Wood has never before encountered, and which strikes her, at this moment, as particularly repulsive. Still, she is momentarily drawn into the discussion—it’s “a radical-feminist fashion statement,” “a defiant, streamlined look”—and to the presumably tasteful before-and-after photos displayed on the screen, and then, underneath her watching, she remembers the phone call. It hits her all over again.
She switches channels. Surely, if something has happened to Terence Wood, the kind of larger-than-life Hollywood celebrity whose untimely death would almost certainly merit an interruption in regular programming, she will not have to flip too long to find out. And, indeed, she doesn’t. CNN has got a tiny map of Maine inset over the blonde head of its anchorwoman, and right away, she knows. Again. It’s like they’ve been waiting for Petra to tune in, only now that she has, she’s not listening, she doesn’t want to hear what this blonde head has to say. She’s thinking of the last time she saw her Wood. She’s trying to remember his last words to her, his smell, the way his balls would spin in their sack when she sucked him off, the sound of his voice, the rough of his beard sandpapered against her skin, that odd little whistle-puckering thing he used to do to clean his teeth after he’d eaten. She doesn’t want to lose the slightest thing.
The map of Maine morphs into a headshot of Terence Wood as a young man, a still from The Half Shell, the movie that launched his career. He’s smiling, his thick, dark hair breezed by a wind machine, and there is magic in his eyes. Petra wasn’t even born at the time of that shoot, but his eyes seem to know her. She looks at the still and swears he can see her coming, and then her own eyes are drawn to the black border underneath the picture, with the still-open birth and death dates burned in (1932– ), and she’s thinking it is like a headstone, a video headstone, the way the television reports on the deaths of all these people. She’s also thinking, well, okay, it’s true, it must be true. They don’t put up dates and black borders around pictures unless it’s true.
The headshot fades and is replaced over the anchorwoman’s other shoulder by one of Bill Clinton, which, in turn, is replaced by photo opportunity footage at some Rose Garden ceremony, and then a shot of Lloyd Bentsen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As Petra Wood collects these various images, she wonders how it is that the stuff of her life has become also the stuff of everyone else’s. She loses her Wood off a cliff in a storm, and here it is for the world to see, scripted and TelePrompted and sifted through the machinery of mass communications. Her kick in the stomach is news to CNN, and, after that, they’re onto the next story.
She reaches for the phone to call Anita, wife number two, who’s up in New Hampshire somewhere (she doesn’t know the number, but it’s on the speed dial). When she follows the cord and fishes the machine out from beneath the covers, she realizes she’s left it off the hook. She clears the line, speed-dials, but the call does not go through. “Hello,” she says, into the silence. “Hello?”
“Oh, good,” she gets back. “Good, I was about to give up on you.”
“Andrew?” Parker? Applegate? Wojiski? What is his last name?
“Yes,” her lawyer says back. “Andrew. Me. Still me. Thought I’d lost you.”
“You’ve been talking to me all this time?” She’s confused a little, that this lawyer person has somehow remained on her telephone.
“Some, but then I heard the television. I stopped when I heard the television.”
She considers this a moment, until it makes sense. “That it?” she says, when it does. “Anybody else die you need to tell me about?”
“No,” Andrew says. “I just wanted to be sure you were okay.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re sure?”
“No, I’m not sure, but I’m okay. Really. We were split, right? That’s why I hired you. I hired you because we were getting a divorce, right? We were about to kick his ass in court. It’s not like we were together.” She strings the words like a charm bracelet to make herself feel better. Underneath, she’s thinking, This is how I feel, this should be how I feel. Then, suddenly: “Anybody else in the car with him?” She doesn’t know where this comes from, but now that it’s out she’s burning to know.
“Like who?”
“Like anyone. I don’t know. That sitcom actress he was banging.”
“I don’t think so,” Andrew says. “I don’t know.”
“Which?”
“Which what?”
“Which?” Petra pushes. “You don’t think so or you don’t know? They’re hardly the same thing.”
“I don’t know, then,” Andrew says. “They didn’t mention about anybody else. You’d think they’d say if there was somebody else.”
“You’d think,” Petra considers.
There’s an overlong pause, during which neither of them has any idea what to say. Petra takes the time to think what she’ll wear on the plane east.
Andrew, finally: “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. I’ll call you later. That be alright, if I call you later?”
“Fine, call me later.”
“Good. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll call you later. Tonight. You gonna be okay?”
“Andrew,” she says, exasperated.
“You got somebody out there to come sit with you, someone to call?”
“Andrew, I’m fine,” she says, “just get off my fucking phone.”
Petra dials again when he does. Answering machine. Anita can’t come to the phone, but Petra’s call is important to her. Really, really. Petra listens to the tape and wonders briefly what kind of message she should leave, if she should just spit it out and deposit it, or if perhaps the enormity of what she has to say is too great for the technology. She guesses Anita already knows, given the time difference. She’s probably been up and about and caught it on the radio or somewhere. Step outside the house, turn on any appliance, and this is the kind of information that will find you before long. Plus, she’s the mother of Wood’s kid. (Oh, shit, Norman; she’d forgotten, for the moment, about Norman.) Surely someone’s called. This is the kind of information probably flows pretty quickly to the mother of someone’s kid.
“Hi,” she finally says, caught short by the beep, “It’s me, Pet. Our husband died. Call me.”
Fifteen minutes to deadline, and Pimletz has got his fifty inches nearly filed. He’s thinking this is probably the longest damn obit he’s ever written, can’t imagine any from his live file likely to surpass it. Ted Williams, maybe, but the way he’s going he’ll probably outlast Pimletz. He read somewhere that Ted Williams was admitted to some hospital somewhere, but that’s one tough bastard, that Teddy Ballgame, and now that he reflects on it, there is no way Terence Wood is more deserving of space than Teddy Ballgame. Not in Boston. He’ll be gone before long, and so will Red Auerbach, Kevin White, Betty Friedan, that channel five anchor lady, and any number of local heroes might beat out this Wood by a couple inches.
There are few surprises left in Pimletz’s line of work, so he takes them where he can. With Rose Kennedy gone, about the only detail to keep things interesting is this right here, trying to figure how much space the Volpes will leave for each subject. That, the cause of death, and the order of assignments. He’ll get to all of them, eventually. They’ll all die of something, but who’s next?
Right now, the day’s only surprise for Pimletz will be his lead. He has no clue how to play it. Volpe’s got someone else on the story, and Pimletz doesn’t have it in him to check with the news desk to see how the paper is handling it. Far as Pimletz knows, Terence Wood’s body has yet to turn up, the guy’s been missing or presumed dead less than twenty-four hours, and the story can go any number of ways: tragic accident, crossed signals, foul play, mysterious disappearance, apparent suicide, colossal misunderstanding.
The way it goes will determine whether Pimletz plays his end as a straight obit, or a tribute, or something else. His lead, determined, will give the piece its tone and meaning. Whatever it is, he’ll stitch it to the next graph so it all fits and flows.
Rest of it is all here: the infamous 1979 Playboy interview in which Wood challenged the Pope to a round of golf, incurring the ceaseless wrath of the religious right, left, and center; the actor’s tongue-wagging protest of the Vietnam War during the Academy Awards, when he marched to the stage to accept his best actor Oscar, waited for the standing ovation to sit down, placed his statue firmly at the edge of the podium, and made to leave it there, offering one of the most stunning acceptance/rejection speeches in Academy history (“I’ll come back for this when our boys are home”); his rumored romances with Twiggy, Cher, Madonna, and virtually every other one-named actress-model-whatever to have crossed the scene in the past thirty years; and his three dryings-out (a course record!) at Betty Ford—the last only a year ago.
Pimletz even wanders beyond the tabloid realm, with enough of Volpe’s precious hometown color to fill a paint store. There are glimpses of Wood’s growing up, the only child of immigrant parents, raised in a cold-water tenement in Boston’s North End. There is Wood as a small boy, selling soda bottles to construction workers at the old Boston Garden site, chilling his inventory on blocks of ice stolen from the neighborhood ice man. There is Wood at twelve, sanding the raised letters on his father’s tombstone; Wood on his high school debating team; Wood on the Philco Television Playhouse; Wood in Korea; Wood on Broadway; Wood roaming the Raider sidelines at the Super Bowl; Wood at the still-birth of his first son, a child he refused to name despite the pleadings of his wife, Elaine.
Not bad, Pimletz thinks, scrolling through what he’s written, waiting for his lead to come to him. When it does, finally, there is Volpe attached to its other end. “Hey, Axel,” he hollers across the newsroom, “you finished wiping your ass yet or what?” and, right away, Pimletz is back to yesterday. Jesus, he’s thinking. He knows. Everybody knows. Then he’s back to today, this. He’s thinking, that’s just the way he talks. Doesn’t mean anything.
“Almost there,” he says, as Volpe reaches his desk. “Just waiting on the lead.”
“Fuck is that supposed to mean?” Volpe barks. “You’re having it delivered? Domino’s is writing your lead?”
About the only thing Pimletz can think to do in response is to stand and step from his desk, clearing the way for his boss. This is the routine when an editor comes to read over his shoulder. Volpe stares back at him contemptuously, sits, rolls the chair to the keyboard, pulls the obit up on Pimletz’s screen, and starts writing:
A dramatic career came to an apparently dramatic end yesterday afternoon with the mysterious disappearance of internationally acclaimed actor Terence Wood, a Boston native whose life was the stuff of legend. . . .
Pimletz looks on and can’t imagine how it is that someone can just sit down and write without thinking about it. Really, he has no idea. He can write, occasionally, and he can pretty much refrain from thinking, but it never occurs to him to try the two things at once.
“There,” Volpe says, standing, “there’s your fucking lead. Fresh from our keep-’em-hot vans.” He holds out his hand, palm up. “I expect a tip.”
“What about the rest of it?” Pimletz asks, overrunning the joke.
“Fuck the rest of it,” Volpe says, pocketing his hand. “Deadline. No time for your dicking around. Just send it to Copy and let them deal with it.” He backpedals as he says this, and, by the time he is through, he has placed six or seven desks between himself and the stormed Pimletz. At the third or fourth of these six or seven desks, Sam Haskins points a can of Lysol mountain scent air freshener at his boss’s nicotine wake.
Pimletz sits back down, expecting to do as he’s told, only he can’t remember the commands for his computer. He has to fumble through his manual to remind himself of the motions he goes through every day, but when he finds what he’s looking for, he notices his screen has gone blank. Then it beeps, and there’s a fake human voice through his speakers telling him he has mail:
Never mind, Axel. I’ll do it myself.
Well, shit, Pimletz thinks, looking reflexively across the room to where he knows he’ll find Volpe staring back at him with those menacing eyes of his. There. Over by the news desk. Only Volpe’s not leaned over someone’s terminal sending silent criticism the hundred feet or so to Pimletz the way he usually is. No, this time Volpe surprises Pimletz. Oh, he’s staring, he’s always staring, but this time Volpe has got a thumb plugged into each ear, he’s waving both hands from the sides of his head, he’s sticking out his tongue. It is like a cartoon tease—nyah nyah, na nyah nyah—and Pimletz has no idea what to make of it, except to think, well, okay, this is something.
Petra Wood, middle-seated two rows deep into coach, is running on silent fumes. She does not understand why it is she is made to tolerate so many insipid little annoyances in the course of an already bad enough day. She just moves from one bother to the next, and each has got her so bent out of shape it’s a wonder her leotarded Isaac Mizrahi pantsuit still fits the way it did when she first tried it on.
First, there was this protracted nonsense on the telephone with some guy from TWA reservations, who claimed the airline’s discounted bereavement fares did not extend to first class tickets. Whoever heard of such a thing? What, people with presumed-dead husbands are not supposed to be comfortable on a five-hour flight? That it? Someone actually expected Petra Wood to sip from plastic? to pay for her drinks? at a time like this?
“Ma’am,” this reservations guy wheedled into the phone, “I mean no disrespect, and all of us here extend our deepest sympathies, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”
Right, like all of them there had actually put their deepest sympathies to a vote. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do,” she insisted. “This is not some farmer’s wife you’re talking to. This is not some lemming. There are always things you can do.”
“Not here,” he said, trying to be pleasant. “I assure you.”
“Well then, I’ll just consider myself assured,” she shot back, not trying at all.
“Look,” he pressed, “ma’am, I’d like to get you on this plane so you can do what you have to do. I know you have to be somewhere. I can check if there’s room in first, if that’s your preference, but you’ll have to pay full fare.”
What’s with this ma’am business, she wondered. She had dialed into some toll-free wasteland, with no way to tell whether she was talking to St. Louis, or Atlanta, or Dallas. Maybe if she knew she could place the ma’am: “Where am I calling?” she said.
“TWA.”
Duh. “No, I mean, where are you right now, what part of the country?”
“We’re not supposed to give out that information.”
“What?” This she could not believe. “Why? What possible reason could there be for TWA to care if I know where I’m calling?”
“Policy, ma’am. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” He said this in a Jack Webb staccato and waited for his laugh. “That’s a joke,” he said, when he got nothing. “Gays in the military. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“That’s a joke?” She really didn’t see it.
“Well, it was,” he said. “Guess it’s not anymore.”
“How ’bout you just tell me where you’re from? Where you were born? You can tell me that, right?”
“Yes, ma’am, I s’pose I can.”
“Well, then, do.”
“New York,” he declared. “Queens, actually. That’s where I was born, although I wouldn’t exactly say that’s where I was from.”
“Where, exactly, would you say that was?” Petra said, with a growing upset at having gotten tangled in such an unnecessary conversation.
“North Carolina, ma’am. The Piedmont. Folks moved there when I was in grade school.”
That would explain the ma’am, she thought.
“Look,” he said, finally warming to this strange, bereaved, and apparently pampered lady on the other end of his line, “I can always issue you the ticket and you can worry about the fare later.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you still have to show up at one of our ticket counters with a death certificate and proof of immediate relations in order to qualify for the discount. Might be worth a shot to just go first class and play dumb.”
“Like we never had this conversation?”
“Exactly, ma’am.”
“Great,” she said, “let’s do that, then.”
“What? Pretend we never had this conversation?” He waited again for a laugh, but Petra Wood was a tough room. “Ba-dump-bump?” he tried, to sell the joke.
“Another joke?” she asked.
“Guess not.” Beat. “So, what’ll it be?”
“Anything,” she said, trying to move this too-polite reservations guy along with as much economy as possible.
“Anything, what?”
“In first. Is there anything in first?”
“Checking,” he announced, adopting a chipper voice evidently meant to convey not only that he was, but also that he was about to place his entire being into some electronic investigatory mode. Again, from somewhere along the information highway, to fill the silence: “Checking.”
Petra Wood, now fully impatient, suddenly decided she had spent enough time on this transaction. She should have been fretting over Anita, or poor Norman, or frantic to learn if there was any news from Maine, or setting up a meeting with her attorneys for when she got back to see about the estate, but there she was quibbling over a couple hundred bucks. What the hell had gotten into her, she wondered. “You know,” she said, interrupting checking mode, “anything is fine.”
“Good,” the reservations guy said, “because anything is all we’ve got. Our last block of first just disappeared from my screen.”
“What does that mean?” By “anything” she had meant aisle, window, or whatever. She hadn’t meant to consider coach.
“It means first is full.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. We went back and forth for so long someone else just snapped ’em up.”
Great, she thought. Now it’s either the huddled masses or another airline. She didn’t have time to start all over again with another airline.
“Ma’am?” he said, waiting for instructions.
Oh, yes, him. “What do I want to do, right? You’re wondering what it is I want to do?”
“Our next flight is two hours later, if you’d like to wait.”
“Or?”
“Or, I could book you in coach and we could pretend we never had this conversation.” He was running out of options. His tone was sunny, as if he didn’t mind at all spending his days with a phone cradled to his neck, or maybe with one of those sleek headsets she’d noticed some of these telemarketing professionals had taken to wearing, as if helping to arrange the last-minute travel plans of distracted, discourteous persons like herself were a kind of calling.
“Coach, then,” she said, “unless you’d just like to chat for a while, give all those empty seats a chance to fill up, too?” Her tone was dark, laced with a touch more sarcasm than she intended, and she regretted it right away, attempting to smooth her demeanor with a joke of her own. “Ba-dump-bump?” she said, thinking this would do.
Of course, it didn’t, because by then the sunny bastard had consigned her to her middle seat, too close to the damn bulkhead to watch the movie and not far enough away from this unusually tall, elaborately bearded Middle Eastern fellow seated directly in front of her, wearing a turban and smelling like he’d been dipped in a vat of curry.
Okay, so that was the first thing. Or maybe the first and second things, if she counts her unfortunate seating as a separate nuisance. Next, there was some additional unpleasantness at check-in, when the agent attempted to check her carry-on bag, and some further words at the gate regarding the complimentary newspapers and coffee, and now that Pet has been settled uncomfortably in her seat, her nerves are in serious need of a good hem. Woman next to her, by the window, has commandeered what seems to Pet to be far more than her fair share of personal space. She’s all spread out and organized and much too comfortable. Right at this moment, this woman is doing some annoyingly serious browsing in the Air Mall catalog from her seat-back pouch. She’s making notes in the margins alongside some of the items, working a calculator to confirm her interest.
“This is something you can’t do without?” Pet wonders, her voice still viscous with the sarcasm that put her here. She couldn’t help but notice her neighbor’s interest in a squirrel-proof bird feeder shaped to resemble Tanya Tucker.
“Oh, why yes!” the woman kindly drawls, happy for the chance to share her dueling enthusiasms for country music and bird-watching. “I’ve already got the Judds side by side over the patio, and Dolly Parton is just a-smilin’ away outside my kitchen window.” The poor dear is tickled to have stumbled onto this common ground with this striking stranger. She just goes on and on: “Why, just the other afternoon, I was doin’ the dishes when this little ruby-throated thing set hisself down right outside my window, and, wonder of wonders, I’ll tell you, this little fella looked near set to go anursin’ on poor Dolly.” She laughs like this is one of the top ten funniest connections she has ever made regarding her country music bird feeders.
“Go on!” Pet exclaims, exaggerating her interest. “That must have been a picture!”
“Oh, darlin’, it was somethin’ to see,” marvels this woman in the window seat.
“Me?” Pet starts in, affecting something like the same drawl as her neighbor, curling her every thought into a kind of question. “I called to order me a few a those Patsy Clines? And the fella, he says to me, you know, how would I like that delivered? And, I says to him, well, special delivery would be fine? And he reads off all the different special delivery options? You know, overnight express? two-day air? three-day ground?” Her accent is a caricature, she’s swallowing her words to keep up with it. “Turns out, they can get these packages to you every which way? But I says back, no, no, no, that’s not at all what I have in mind? And he wants to know what it was I did have in mind, and so I just said, suspended air freight? I don’t know why I was funnin’ with him so, or what put me in this kinda mind, but it just come to me. Suspended air freight, that’s what I said, just like that. Naturally, this poor fella had never heard of suspended air freight, so I explained that I wanted my Patsy Clines flown to the Tennessee hills and then dropped from the plane and slapped against the side of one of those cliffs they’ve got there, until my desired items were reduced to recyclables? This is what I told him. Recyclables. They’re plastic, right?” She laughs as if she might choke on her own good cheer, and embroiders this with a string of unnecessary breath-catching gestures. “Oh, my Lord!” she says, patting at her chest with an open palm, pretending to ease herself into a lower gear. “And then, oh, oh, oh”—she pats at the air in front of her unnerved neighbor, to make sure she still has what’s left of her attention—“I’m leaving out the best part. I tell the guy, you know, if he could somehow fix it so that the pilot could be playing ‘I Fall to Pieces’ on the cassette when he dropped my package, I would consider that extra special delivery, and would be willin’ to pay a few dollars more?” She builds to her best mock-cackle. “Extra special delivery?” she says, slapping at her own knee. She makes to catch her breath again. “Good lord!” she says, “that fella was off the phone quicker than if I were tryin’ to sell somethin’ to him!”
Petra Wood looks up from her performance and is nearly able to count the fillings in the mouth of the woman sitting next to her. This is what it means when they say someone’s mouth is agape, she thinks. This is as agape as it gets. The woman, flabbergasted, manages to clutch her Air Mall catalog to her breast with one hand and reach for the orange “call” button at her armrest with the other, going to harumphing lengths to avoid eye contact with the devilish woman at her side, and when the stewardess arrives to see what the trouble is, the woman very demurely asks if there might be an empty seat toward the back. Something about the rumble of the engines makes it easier for her to fall off asleep, she says, although from the urgent, hushed tone of her voice she might be discussing matters of national security.
“That will be fine, ma’am,” the stewardess says, and she helps the flustered lady collect her few things and inch her way past Petra Wood to safety.
There, Pet thinks, sliding over to the still-warm seat by the window, stretching out. Wasn’t so hard.
There is a coffee shop in downtown Bar Harbor, Maine, serves perhaps the greasiest mess of home fries ever to have fled a skillet. Place is landmarked for its home fries, which are larded and charred and coated with this heavythick glaze of some secret something that lets them slide past peristalsis for the nearest artery. They taste famously like burnt candied yams, and even the late-to-lunch locals can’t inhale enough of them. Folks have been known to drive two hours out of their way for a plateful, and, in these parts, a two-hour side trip is pretty much a four-star review. This part of New England, everything is so spread out and remote that a one-hour trip is nothing, but two? Well, that’s a high compliment.
The restaurant has got no name Terence Wood can easily determine, unless of course the Good Food and Coffee Shop signs out front are meant as more than exposition. Even the menus offer no clue: Menu. About the best a first-timer like Wood can gather is a sanctioned nickname—Two Stools—which appears to have something to do with the overweight waitress working the room like a matron and with the limited seating at the lunch counter. The spinning seat discs are a memory on the half-dozen metal posts lining the counter’s length, save for two at the end by the cash register, and Wood guesses there might be a story behind their absence. He won’t have to wait long to find out.
Wood, dressed down in a straw fishing hat and plaid flannel shirt, has stumbled in to refuel and evacuate. He’s got his long gray hair tied with a red rubber band he found lying on the street. He hasn’t eaten since the sample pack of cheese-filled Combos he collected first thing this morning when he stopped by a roadside convenience store to see if his exit had made the early papers. Fuck did he know about newspapers and deadlines? Closest he ever came to the world of print journalism was a cut bit as a paper boy in Citizen Kane— his first Hollywood payday, a favor to his connected uncle. While this insignificant contribution to movie history may have been left to shrivel on strips of acetate in some forgotten vault, it also left Wood with the idea that if his car should somehow sail off a cliff during the night, there might be some mention of it on the front pages by morning. This was news. Surely there might be some paper boy, somewhere, urging early morning commuters to plunk down their coins for the latest on the sudden death of a Hollywood legend: Read all about it! Terence Wood, dead at sixty-five! Entertainment world rocked by the news!
But, alas, there was no mention of the actor’s sudden presumed death. Wood idly thumbed the newspapers and magazines on display, strolled the few aisles with enough interest to forestall any suspicions of loitering, and, in this way, consumed some additional minutes on this first day of his new freedom. This last had quickly become one of his primary concerns. He hadn’t figured on all the time he would now have to fill, hadn’t decided yet if this was a good thing. Some other things he hadn’t figured on were eating, shitting, showering, going through the rest of his life unnoticed, and now that these had taken turns occurring to him, he figured he’d deal with them on an as needed basis.
First, food. As he continued with his aisle strolling, he realized he was famished, and the brightly packaged snack foods leapt off the shelves to assault his hunger in a way he found strangely satisfying. Oh, he didn’t do anything more than consider each package, maybe handle a few of them, hold one or two to his nose, but this was enough for Terence Wood. There is something filling, he considered, in staring down a box of Freihoffer’s cookies, assorted, or a neatly stacked tower of Pringle’s ranch-flavored potato chips, or individually wrapped Ring Dings, Ding Dongs, or Ho Hos, or the exalted fake-creaminess of a package of double-stuff Oreos, when your wallet is trapped in the glove box of your jettisoned four-by-four vehicle and you can’t know how far the fifty-three dollars and change in your pants pocket will take you.
Wood was drawn to the Combos not for the promised bursts of zesty processed cheese or the ten-cent introductory price tag, but because he once had a thing going with a woman who sang back-up on the Combos jingle: “Combos really cheeses your hunger away.” The line, between them, became a source of endless bedroom by-play. One of the singer’s favorite gags was to grip Wood’s cock like a microphone and croon to him like she was on Carson, like he was her first true break, and it was only underneath her sometime teasing that Wood could recognize the real omnipotence of his situation, that he felt he could actually stand before this girl and cheese away her hunger simply by being who he was, by letting her perform for him this unadorned act of raw tenderness, by accepting her supplication. He would fill her with the seeds of power and fame, he used to think, his celebrated greatness would become hers, and she would thank him for it, ask for more.
Cindy. Her name was Cindy, and this was how Wood remembered her. As he popped one of the Combos nuggets into his mouth this morning, he tasted again the stale sweetness of this singing Cindy. It came right back to him. The girl had kept what seemed like a lifetime supply of Combos in a corner of her studio apartment (one of the perks of her jingling), and in the few weeks they spent together, her lips could hardly brush up against Wood without leaving behind specks of pretzel and puttied cheese. Sometimes, Wood’s tongue in her mouth would discover a coarse paste, and he would return to his own mouth and pretend not to mind. He recalled drinking a lot of water.
The Combos held him through mid-afternoon, when his stomach began to feel as if someone had inflated a balloon inside of it. Also, like he was about to give birth to an avocado pit. He had to shit, and he couldn’t tell if the two developments were somehow related. Probably. Anyway, this Two Stools joint surfaced in time to cover both needs, and Wood slipped in and made for the back. Earlier in the day, he had found the apparently abandoned straw fishing hat on a park bench, and he pulled the brim down low, seeking obscurity. He caught a glimpse of himself in the plate glass window on the way in, and it didn’t seem to him he looked like Terence Wood. He was dirty, and unkempt, and underdressed, and not at all himself. This was good. His plan was to slink to some back table, order the cheapest item on the menu, and nurse an accompanying cup of coffee until he could motivate his bowels. He asked the huge waitress for an egg sandwich, heavy pepper, and settled back to soak up what he could of the local color.
This is what he now makes out: Two Stools, the waitress, is the daughter of the restaurant’s owner. It’s his place, but she runs it. She’s got two short-order cooks, each named Lenny, and herself, and that’s it. Her father lives on a golf course in Florida. Eleventh hole. Dogleg left. She sends him a check every month. Summers, it’s actually a good-size check. The deal with the stools at the counter is that, one by one, as the place fell into disrepair, they kind of spun loose from their mountings, the fitting grooves worn from more than fifty years of fidgety swiveling. This happened over a period of ten, twelve years, Wood surmises, and Two Stools was forever meaning to take care of the problem, fix the place back up, nice, but she never seemed to have the time or the money to make the repairs. ’Course, most of the folks seemed to prefer the mismatched tables and chairs she’d collected and loosely scattered about the restaurant, and it was a lot cheaper to scavenge some tables and chairs than it was to adequately replace a row of lunch counter stools. Before anybody knew it, they were down to just these last two stools. One of the regulars, guy named Joe Scapsi, finally looked up from his home fries one late afternoon and affectionately remarked on how fortunate the waitress was to have her chair still standing. “If there weren’t two stools left together, honey, you’d have no place to sit down,” he reportedly said, or words to this effect, and from that moment forward, the waitress and her father’s restaurant went by their new name.
All of this comes to Wood in fifteen minutes, like a side dish to his small meal. Sure enough, this waitress is so big-butted he can’t imagine she ever was able to balance herself on a single stool, even as a small child. Yet, when she sits every few minutes or so to tally up her checks or credit the tabs of her regulars, she manages to slither elegantly between the two remaining stools and hoist herself onto both seats. Really, she moves like a fat ballerina, but a ballerina just the same. Most of her excess fleshiness drops into the space between the two stools, which do an otherwise serviceable job of supporting her considerable weight.
Wood looks on and connects the woman to his old points of reference. She reminds him first of one of those dancing hippos from an old Disney cartoon and then of a story he read in Variety, couple days back, about a similarly overweight woman who had brought suit against her local multiplex for failing to provide what her lawyer called “wide-body seating.” He wonders what it must be to go through life with such an added burden. Wondering, he upbraids himself for managing to translate even so innocuous a human condition as obesity into movie terms. Here he is, freshly disappeared into the middle of nowhere—or, more precisely, the edge of nowhere, this being a coastal town—and, first chance he gets, he comes right back to the trades, to the industry, to cartoons. This poor fat girl works two shifts to stay solvent, keep her father on the links and off welfare, sustain the out-of-work locals with her extremely reasonable prices, and shoulder the (mostly) good-natured taunts of her regulars, and she smiles underneath the indignity of having to use two counter stools to support her girth. It is all Wood can do to keep from optioning her life story.
“Refill?”
The voice startles Wood from his wonderings, principally because his mind was on something other than his coffee, but also because it sounds far too delicate to have come from such a big woman. Also, he is surprised that so large a woman could have sidled up alongside his table without warning. Here is her voice, again: “Most people, they order themselves a bottomless coffee, they drink maybe two, three cups.” The waitress’s tone is pleasant, playful. “They want their money’s worth.”
“Hit me,” Wood says back, matching her tone, inching his cup forward, and as she pours for him, he fixes on the still-moving flesh of her arms, their doughy warmth, the way she seems to occupy this incredible space without encroaching on his own. “This place have a name?” he says, looking up from his filled cup, making conversation.
“Not really,” she says, softly. “Folks know where to find us.”
“How ’bout yourself?”
“Know where to find me, too.” She laughs, knowing this is not quite what her new customer means to discern. “I’m always here.”
“No, I mean a name,” he clarifies. “What is your name?”
“Everyone calls me Two Stools,” she says, with practiced pride. “You can do the same.”
“I’d prefer to know your given name,” Wood persists, “if you don’t mind.”
“Two Stools is fine,” the waitress answers, stepping shyly away from the table in a way that perhaps suggests she does. “I don’t mind it at all. Even my father calls me Two Stools.”
“That’s fine,” Wood says, “but I’d prefer to know your real name.”
“Grace,” she announces, extending her hand. “Name’s Grace. Pleased to meet you.”
“Grace,” he says back, in appraisal. “Grace. I believe it suits you.” From any of Grace’s regulars, this line would have sounded counterfeit, but Terence Wood has a way about him when it comes to women. All women. Fat. Skinny. Pound ugly. They are all made to feel beautiful around him. This is sometimes an effort, sometimes not, but here, now, it is no trouble at all. Up close, this Grace has an astonishingly pretty face, and she smells (wonderfully) like fresh bread. There is something about her Wood cannot yet identify, but, nevertheless, has got him bent to distraction.
He collects her hand and is startled by the meat of it. He’s got big hands himself, but this woman can just about swallow him up with her paws. Her fingers are like sausages. Then, quickly, he’s off her hand and back on to these pleasantries. Right. He needs a name. Hadn’t thought of that. Okay, okay, think. Name. Something he can slip into, some new space he can occupy. A character, perhaps, from one of his pictures. Yes, that’s it. Someone he’s played before. Someone he knows. This way he gives himself not just a name, but a history, a personality. A plot.
His mind races over his credits, trying to place himself. There was that architect he played, lost his wife in an elevator accident, one of his own buildings. No, no, no. Too recent. And what would an architect be doing here, flannel-shirted, in a remote corner of Maine? What about that public defender, took up the rights of all those ’60s radicals? Joe Justice? What the hell kind of name was Joe Justice? (Jesus, he’s made a lot of shit pictures.) No, no, he needs something a little less assuming, something more generic. Whatwhatwhatwhat? Small-time circus owner. Neurosurgeon. Corrupt congressman. That gay guy he played, coming out to his family, his own kids. Nothing fits, until he hits on Front to Back, this all-but-forgotten draft-dodging picture he made opposite an undiscovered Goldie Hawn between campaign appearances for Humphrey. Played a guy, fled to Canada, built a new life for himself. Could work. Picture sank like a cinder block, but it wasn’t half bad. The timing was just wrong, the director for shit, but this actually works okay for him now, this works it so that he can slip into this borrowed persona undetected. Far as he knows, the picture’s never been released on video. He can’t imagine anyone around here has seen it recently enough to remember it. Now he just needs to remember the fucking guy’s name.
He considers all of this in a moment, the same moment this Grace has been using to make Wood’s acquaintance. He’s still got hold of her meaty sausages; it has not yet become an awkward exchange.
“Trask,” he says, remembering the character’s name. “Harlan Trask. Just passing through.”