Up-Gathered Now Like Sleeping Flowers
Norman, dead drunk but not really, turns to his dead-but-not-really father and frames a question. It doesn’t matter what he asks, only that he does. The trick, he’s learned, is to get this ghost of Woodman started. When he appears like this—late at night, as in a vodka-soaked hologram—it doesn’t take much to get him talking, and in the run-on, Norman can sometimes discover the truths of his growing up. He hears what he wants to hear.
“You bought Microsoft at what?”
This is what Norman comes up with because this is what’s on top. He’s sorry about this, but lately, with all the estate nonsense, and the back and forth with the lawyers, and the persistant hounding from certain elements of the media, and the not-quite-Sotheby’s auction the widow Pet is considering to consolidate all the unagreed-upon stuff (custom shoe horns!), Norman has been fairly preoccupied with the financial aspects of his father’s life. Stocks. Trusts. Safe deposit boxes. Limited partnerships. Art. Insurance policies. It’s all that’s left. That and his pictures, but Norman can’t watch a Woodman picture without thinking also of what’s to come. Or, what has passed. Even the early ones—The Half Shell and Straight On till Morning and (especially) Sixes and Sevens, where his father actually buys it in the end in a badly orchestrated bar fight over a badly dressed woman—they’re all tied up in the same thing.
Norman looks at these old movies, piped in on Ted Turner’s cable empire or pulled from the worn DVD and video sleeves in his haphazard collection, and in his father’s eyes he sees the future about to happen and slip away. It’s like he knew. All along. Like he was just waiting.
And so he’s left with the mundane, the temporal fuel that fed his father’s private life. Elaine. Pet. His mother. Money. Houses. Some cars. Microsoft. Woodman was in at the beginning. The story Norman heard was he’d met Bill Gates at some party, although he could never imagine Terence Wood and Bill Gates at the same party. The young Gates made an impression on Woodman, although Norman could never imagine his father leaving an inverse imprint other than by reputation. However it happened, the stock split itself a dozen ways like a fucking Breck commercial, and, in the end, Wood was holding approximately three hundred thousand shares.
Norman chokes on the math.
“Sid put me into it,” the actor says to his not-really-dead-drunk son—or, at least, this is what his not-really-dead-drunk son wants to hear. It is a voice from another dimension and a reference to one in a long line of money managers who, with this great exception, succeeded mostly in mismanaging Terence Wood’s funds. What Norman guesses he is after with this line of communication is a fix on how it was that his father ended his life with the taint of money troubles when he owned approximately thirty million dollars in Microsoft stock.
“It was pure profit,” Wood spirits back to his son. “I couldn’t touch it without giving it all back in taxes. You know that.”
Yes, of course, he does. It is an argument Norman had heard a dozen times before his father’s death and another dozen since. (He’s counted and rounded off.) “But you didn’t have to go making those piece of shit pictures!” he rails. “You could have borrowed against it on margin. Something. You didn’t have to go taking your teeth out on screen!”
“No, but—”
“Like a fucking character actor!”
“What can I tell you, son?”
A lot, Norman wants to say. Everything. Like, for starters, what the hell is he supposed to do about Pet? Tell him that. He likes her and all, Norman does, they’re connected, always have been, but she’s been all weird around him since Woodman died, a little too . . . what? Here: she’s been a little too wetly affectionate. He can’t think how else to put it, but that about cuts it, and anyway, there, it’s out, they can finally talk about it. She’s always eyeing him, rubbing up against him, finding reasons to be left alone with him in otherwise empty houses. She calls late at night—like really late at night, like three or four, too late, even, for the coast—and then has nothing to say. Poor Norman’s got no idea how to be around her, what’s expected, what’s going on. Once, back in L.A.—this was pretty extreme, even for Pet—she walked naked into the media room, where Norman was just in from some club and winding down in front of Conan O’Brien, and she sat next to him like nothing at all and said, “You think he’s funny? I’m not so sure I think he’s funny.” Like sitting around naked was the most natural thing in the world. She sat and watched David Cassidy do a number from Shenandoah, which he’d just mounted in some dinner theater somewhere, and then suffer the predictable late night taunts on his fallen teen idolhood.
“I used to love him,” Pet said. “God, look what happened to him. That hair!” Then she leaned back against the cushions, set her legs Indian-style like Sharon Stone auditioning for Disney’s live-action remake of Pocahontas, dipped into the potato chip canister she found at her hip, and, for a while, said nothing. When she tired of this and the nonresponsiveness of her stepson at the other end of the couch, she quietly stood and left the room—carrying, the nonresponsive Norman couldn’t help noticing, a couple Pringle crumbs with her on her pubes.
Okay, Woodman, what’s the deal with that? And with the way people have been looking at him since Maine? Like he’s contagious. Like he, all of a sudden, has this ominous background music announcing his coming and going, as if his life had been scored recently by that drummer from the Police, alerting perfect strangers to his now-troubled presence. If music isn’t the tell, it must be something else, because he can’t go anywhere these days without someone picking up on something. Before, he lived in the once-removed glow of his father’s fame. He didn’t advertise it, but it tailed him like one of those fucking bowls of oatmeal from those old commercials. (Maypo, he thinks.) People knew. And now they know. This. It’s all around him, what’s happened. It’s a part of him. It’s in the air, and on his shoes, and no one wants to get too close for fear it’ll rub off.
And the giant question: how the hell is he, Norman, supposed to make a place for himself in his father’s wake? This is one for a team of psychologists—assisted, perhaps, by a bunch of brown-nosing graduate students—but, as long as he’s on it, he might as well throw it out there. It’s like when he was a kid, staying with Woodman, and, in the morning, he’d bounceflounce into that great big bed with him. In the grand landscape of sleeped-in sheets and too many pillows, he’d start to feel misplaced and alone and incapable of filling the spaces his father left behind. On the man’s chest alone there were, like, a couple acres of uncharted territory. He was like a climbing apparatus. There was just too much of him and not nearly enough of Norman, who’d eventually roughhouse the covers to the floor, where he could make his own room.
“I thought you were just goofing around,” Norman hears. “Horseplay.”
“No,” Norman says. “I was hiding.”
“From what?”
Norman shrugs. He thinks about this. “I don’t know. You, maybe?” He’s guessing, fishing. They never talked when his father was alive. Not like this. Like this is a revelation. Like this is the way a father is meant to talk to his son, right? Like this is how they do it in the rest of the world. (On television!) When they had it to do for real, it was long distance, through the gossip columns, passed along comments from hangers-on. There were some shared photo opportunities—at charity events, in airports, courtside at the Lakers—but there was nothing ever natural about their time together, not that Norman can now recall. For a stretch, late 1980s, maybe early 1990s, Wood communicated with his son only in one-word postcards: “Persevere.” “Agitate.” “Listen.” During another stretch, between Anita and Pet, there were, like, a dozen girlfriends, each introduced to Norman through the pages of some tabloid or other. (One of them, a redhead named Katrinka, was sent to the airport to meet Norman for a weekend visit with an introductory note from Woodman to prove she was legit.) Always, it was what was not said that mattered most. Or, what was said to someone else.
In film school, Norman is making a movie about a father and son, only the father’s dead and the son has a little trouble dealing. The bone of the piece is the way the two of them still have this relationship going through these same kinds of late-night visits. Well, they’re not exactly the same, but sort of. There’s another movie he wants to do, not totally unrelated, about a father and son who fly all over the world to these different Planet Hollywood openings, but Norman doesn’t have the budget to pull it off. What he’s got is, like, no budget at all, and so he’s going with the smaller, more intimate story. In the script, which Norman’s calling Special Effects, he’s written it so the dead man’s ghost actually inhabits his scenes—he can move objects, occupy real space, you can see his reflection in the mirror—partly because it’s easier to tell it without any convoluted narrative tricks and to film it without any special effects (that’s where he gets the title), but mostly because that’s how it always seems to Norman.
Here, now, late at night in his shitty little apartment, it is as if his father has pierced some fourth wall of his near-dreams to invade his senses of time and space and order. He’s drunk, a little, but that’s not it. This registers for Norman as a sobering thing. He’s got this image of his father, this fading memory, and it’s lit up on some big internal screen. Then the image steps from the screen and into the room like Woody Allen had it set up in The Purple Rose of Cairo. When it happens, it is as if the Woodman, Norman’s Woodman, is truly here. When he leaves, if he’s been drinking, he leaves behind the glass; if he’s been sitting, the sofa cushions hold his shape.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got one of your freak film school friends lined up to play me,” Norman hears.
“Actually, I was thinking of Brian Dennehy.”
“Brian Dennehy?” The voice is insulted, incredulous.
Norman does not respond.
Again: “Brian Dennehy?”
“I’ve got a way to get it to him,” Norman justifies. “He’s a friend of one of the professors here. He likes to help out on these student projects. He’s good at what he does.”
“This is what you think of me? Brian Dennehy?”
“Lighten up, Woodman. It’s just a movie. Like you used to say.”
“Yeah, but Brian Dennehy?” The ghost of Terence Wood is seething. “He makes television movies! He couldn’t carry a cartoon!”
Norman lets this hang in the still air of his shitty apartment alongside his father’s visage. What he wants to say is, yeah, well, at least he didn’t think to try, Weatherbee. At least he hasn’t sunk that far. Instead, what he says is, “What makes you think it’s about you?”
“Yeah, like it’s about some other father and son. It’s about Kirk Douglas and one of his boys. It’s the Martin Sheen Family Christmas.” You could cut a wheel of hard cheese with his sarcasm.
“No, I mean, it’s not like anything we ever had. Where the fuck were you all those years?”
“Where the fuck am I now?”
“My point exactly. It’s a fantasy. It’s not based on you and me. It’s not anything we ever shared.”
“Fantasy is you thinking you can make a movie. Fantasy is you thinking that candy-ass school can teach you how to make pictures.” This stings, but Norman waits for the rest of it: “It looks easy to you, what I do.”
“Did, Woodman. What you did. You don’t make movies anymore, not since long before you drove off that cliff, and even when you did you were just reading someone else’s lines.” He pauses to consider his point. “Making pictures. That’s such shit. Doesn’t take much to read someone else’s lines.”
“Ouch,” the voice pretends at hurt. Then, almost in admiration: “Jesus, where’d you get that nasty streak? And to your old man.”
“From you, you sonofabitch.” Norman takes a final swig from the flavored vodka bottle (peach) on the Pioneer speaker at his side.
“Damn right, from me. Don’t go saying I never gave you anything.”
Norman makes a note of this, thinks it’s something he might be able to use.
The cabin where Pimletz has been holed up since forever has got this massive stone fireplace at its center, which seems, to Pimletz, bigger than his entire apartment. In the hearth alone, there’d be room for his dresser, his straight-backed chairs, and the crate he uses for a kitchen table. Here, for some reason, he’s set up his writing desk, run an extension cord for his laptop, piled his sorted and foldered notes, and put the remote phone to rest on its base. There’s a picture window with a great view of the woods and a sky-lit loft over the living room. There’s even a little breakfast nook back in the kitchen, which would have made a nice place to work, but here he is in the dank, cool grit of fitted stone, working at what it is he has to do. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t put the fireplace to its intended use, which would have been a good thing, considering the bite of New England winter. He figures his decision to use it instead as an office must have to do with wanting to get a little heat going in his writing, to light a fire under this project.
He sees things a little too literally sometimes, Pimletz does, and he’s tucked himself into Terence Wood’s stone hearth expecting sparks. What he gets, instead, is an inventory of false starts and misguided notions, including the giant fucking one that put him here in the first place. Yeah, right, Axel. You can write a book. On some other plane, you can write a book. In your dreams. . . .
Predictably, this is not turning out to be the book of his dreams, but Pimletz isn’t sure it ever was. It’s an assignment, he keeps telling himself. A good gig. The deal is, for twenty-five thousand dollars up front, he gets to slog thigh-deep in the life and times of Terence Wood, the blustering movie actor whose mysterious death a couple months back vaulted him from a waning celebrity to just about legendary status. He gets to live in the great man’s cabin, thumb through the great man’s papers, consume the nonperishables in the great man’s pantry, wipe his ass with the great man’s Charmin, and call down to Boston on the great man’s nationwide calling plan. All of it with the sanction of the great man’s estate and all in the ostensible name of research and atmosphere-soaking. And, here’s the kicker: if Pimletz does all of these things to the estate’s satisfaction and, in the process, produces a posthumous autobiographical manuscript written, natch, under the great man’s name that, in turn, meets with the satisfaction of the publisher, then Pimletz will receive another twenty-five thousand, a vaguely delineated piece of the back end, and the thin chance at lending new shape to his career.
In the meantime, he deludes himself into thinking he is in control, at least in editorial control, at least until he relinquishes the first draft of the book to Wood’s various people. Right now, tucked cozily into the opening of Terence Wood’s stone fireplace and slipped easily into the great man’s open-toed sheepskin slippers, Pimletz is not about to give up control.
It is not for reasons of artistic integrity that Pimletz expects to remain in charge, but rather for reasons of sloth. From his perspective, on page thirty-seven, Pimletz is not expecting to finish a first draft any time soon. He’s made about full use of the scant notes and log entries Wood left behind at the time of his death, and he’s come up dry in his efforts to pull salient note and comment from the great man’s wives, his kid, his famous friends. Past week or so, he’s busied himself screening old Terence Wood movies on the great man’s big-screen television to see if they might suggest some way to fill a few paragraphs. And he’s thumbed through a coffee-table reference book, The Films of Terence Wood, to where the pages are fairly stained with margin notes and Cheese Doodle residue and turned-over pages. The book includes production notes—dates, credits, and locations—for every movie Terence Wood ever made (and a few he merely thought of making, but never quite managed), beginning with a small part in the 1953 thriller Magnificent, in which, the coffee-table author is quick to note, Terence Wood wasn’t.
Hamlin, at the front end of this misguided notion, suggested to Pimletz he keep a list of Wood’s dead costars so that he might let his imagination run. Trouble is, Pimletz’s imagination runs like a drugged tortoise, so he hasn’t gotten much past the list itself: Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck, Lee Remick, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman. . . .
“Now what?” he said to Hamlin one afternoon, back in Boston for a change of clothes and scenery. He actually brought the list with him for Hamlin’s approval.
“Now what?” Hamlin echoed, mocking, working the lead on a piece of his own, not paying full attention. “I’ll tell you now what.” He rolled his chair back from his desk, turned to face Pimletz to focus on this particular piece of show-and-tell, flipped through the oranged pages of Pimletz’s reference book, and landed on an idea: “Trouble No More,” he read, without looking up. “This is fucking paydirt. United Artists. 1969. Durango, Colorado. Richard Widmark, Lee Remick, John Wayne in a cameo. Janis Joplin, even, in her first screen role. First and only.”
“I can read, asshole,” Pimletz interrupted, not sure he wanted to hear how what keeps him up nights is no trouble at all for the next guy.
“It’s not the reading I’m worried about, my overwhelmed friend,” Hamlin taunted, swatting Pimletz playfully (and a little too hard) on the head with the book. “It’s the comprehension.”
“Fine,” Pimletz said, rubbing his head, “I get it. I com-pre-hend.” He drew out the word. “So now what?”
“Now is where you sit down and write that the filming of Trouble No More, down there in sleepy Durango—population, what, like, twelve, couple dozen more in summer maybe—calls to mind a memorable moment. Now you write that Wood and Lee Remick and Janis Joplin were tripping one night on some mushrooms or some shit, this was the sixties, right? This was what people did. It’s not that much of a stretch.
“They were sitting uncomfortably in one of those phony mining cars they had strewn about the set because, you know, Durango is one of those old mining towns. There was that scene in the movie where Wood’s character was trapped in the mine, and Janis Joplin, who played his daughter, had to go running through the town one afternoon to find her mother, Lee Remick’s character, to tell her the trouble with Pa down in the mine. Then there was that great moment where John Wayne swept in to lead the rescue attempt, and the whole fucking town had gathered outside the mine to see what the matter was. He took one of those beat-up cars from outside the shaft and hurled it right at the opening, in one giant frustration. Only, you know, the Duke was getting on in years, so the car he picked up was pretty flimsy, like it was just painted plastic, or balsa wood, or whatever they use in those Hollywood prop departments. But there were also a couple real cars strewn around, for authenticity, and it doesn’t seem possible that even the Duke in his prime could have hurled one of the real deals, least not all that far.
“But anyway, now is when you establish about those mining cars and tell about what a dead-end town Durango was—throw in some local color. Then you get back to how Wood was just tripping his brains out and running around bare-ass naked with his wife and daughter—his screen wife and daughter—and how they somehow managed to squeeze, all three of them, butt-naked, into one of those little cars, one of the real ones because, you know, what the hell else is there to do in Durango, right? I mean, this is fucking Durango, Colorado. The Toenail of the West. Fuck it, the In-Grown Toenail of the West.
“And then you write how Wood doesn’t remember Janis Joplin being all that good-looking, but she was limber as hell, and she tasted, sweetly, of lilacs. That’s the way you write it, just like that, ‘she tasted, sweetly, of lilacs.’ And you write how Lee Remick was just one of the great beauties of her time, a real presence, how she was into some real wild shit, how, after a while, the three of them talked themselves into this car just for laughs, you know, just because it was there, because it was Durango. But then one of them looked up, probably it was Lee Remick, yeah, definitely Lee Remick, and realized they’d fitted themselves in too tightly. It was all just a little too cozy, and they couldn’t pull themselves out, not without help or external lubrication, certainly not without a clear head.
“It slowly occured to them there was nothing to do but start screaming until help arrived, only the problem with this was that it was, like, two o’clock in the morning, and there was no one around. They ended up spending the night in this way, amazingly, or at least a couple hours, long hours, and the screaming was kind of half-hearted, but still.
“Along the way, Wood remembers having to take a leak. Jesus it was bad. He even remembers mentioning this to Lee Remick, who was awake most of the night and who thought it was one of the funniest fucking things she’d ever heard. Joplin was out cold by this time, but Remick was up—fuckin’-A she was up—and she kept telling Wood to just let it go, let it go, he was among friends. Soon she started saying she had to go too—she’s got a pee coming on is how she put it—and after a while, with the way she was just laughing and laughing, hard, she started to stream against the cold metal of the car. Even then, Wood couldn’t bring himself to go. He just couldn’t. The thought of sitting in a puddle of his own piss with a sleeping Janis Joplin and a stoned-out-of-her-mind Lee Remick was an execration to the great Terence Wood, even as the noise of Lee Remick’s pissing put him in pretty much the same position, biologically, psychologically. Practically.
“Anyway, pissed, they sat awake a couple hours. They’d run out of screaming and laughing and fondling. They didn’t have it in them to try to squiggle free. It was warm enough with all that flesh pressed tightly together, and all that was left was to sit and wait for the early crew to start its shift and get things ready for the day’s shooting. Finally, one of the technicians came by and noticed the trouble these three stars had gotten into, this laughable trouble, and he set about finding someone to help him hoist them out of the car and back into their clothes.
“Then you write that, before it was over, Richard Widmark came by to take pictures. Richard Widmark, this is the kicker to the whole deal. Someone woke Richard Widmark up at the hotel in town, and he came down to take pictures. For the rest of his life, Wood was after him to make copies; it was like a running thing between them, but he’d never seen copies. Then you write that he knows that somewhere out there, somewhere there are copies of Widmark’s photographs of the three of them, Wood and Lee Remick and Janis Joplin, all fried and naked and tripping and stuffed uncomfortably into a mining car on the set of this otherwise forgettable picture. You write that his secret hope, Wood’s abiding hope, is that they turn up, these Richard Widmark shots, not in the Enquirer or the Star or on one of those ridiculous tabloid television shows, but out there on the Web for the whole world to see on someone’s homepage, where they can be downloaded and hard copied into every fucking home on the planet because this, to Wood, is what celebrity is all about. This is the point of the whole fucking anecdote. Hell, it might as well be the theme of your whole fucking book, if you ever manage to write it. To be photographed by Richard Widmark, naked and stoned and tired and sitting in a puddle of Lee Remick’s piss, with Janis Joplin along for the ride and unable to keep up, this is the essence of what it means to move about in the strange light of Hollywood, to be above the laws of human nature and polite society. This is what it means to be Terence Wood. This is what you write about. This is your now what.”
Pimletz can’t get over it. He doesn’t know whether to ask Hamlin to start in again, slowly this time, so he can get it all down, or to stand up and applaud. He doesn’t know whether Hamlin was yanking him or taking him to someplace he might need to find again. “Just like that?” he asks.
“Just like that.”
“But it never happened!”
“Everyone’s dead,” Hamlin says, turning back to his own work. “Who cares it never happened? Write it and it might as well have.”
Pimletz thinks about this for longer than he needs to. “You can do this? It’s ethical?”
“Fuck ethical. It’s celebrity pap. It’s ghostwritten celebrity pap. Legal is all you need to worry about.”
“Okay, so what about legal?” Pimletz wants to know. “Can’t the estate be sued?”
“What estate, doughboy? You. Read your contract. No one’s suing the estate of Terence Wood without dragging your ass into it.”
Damn. “But there’s insurance. Someone said something about author’s insurance.”
Hamlin usually relished in confusing his usually confused friend, but he was on deadline and didn’t have the time. “Yes, there’s insurance,” he finally said, typing underneath his dismissal. “Probably there’s insurance, but who’s gonna sue? Everyone’s dead, asshole. You can’t libel the dead. Journalism 101.”
Pimletz all but groans in relief. He hadn’t yet committed anything to paper—Jesus, he hadn’t even committed it to memory—but he was relieved just the same. This meant it was a whole new enterprise, a whole new book deal. Trouble no more. Anything was possible. “So, like, I can use that?” he asked, begging permission, wanting, at least, a place to start. “There’s no problem with me using that?” It sounded good, this naked assessment of the convoluted values of Terence Wood’s world; it sounded like something the great man would write, like it would kill a few pages, maybe lead to a few more. Plus, in an unbelievable way, it struck Pimletz as moderately believable. Shit, he bought it, and he’s not as naive as Hamlin would have him think.
“What?” Hamlin sends back, no longer paying attention.
“You know, Lee Remick? Durango, Colorado.”
“Fuck do I care? Go. Use it. Have a party.” He was three paragraphs into his lead on his own piece, had the rest of it pretty much written in his head. Today’s business: a mini-scandal surrounding a State House official caught high-ending it at the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. If it weren’t for Pimletz, he’d be on to the next thing.
“Great,” Pimletz says, trying to remember Hamlin’s exaggeration. “Good. Thanks.” Janis Joplin, he prompted himself. Don’t forget the part about Janis Joplin. That’s key. And the piss. And the Richard Widmark thing with the photos, with what it all means. He looked on at his typing friend and marveled once again at Hamlin’s ability to fill an empty page, to think on the fly. To do, write, be. Pimletz wished he could be so effortless, so completely without fear or hesitation. He wished he could open those same valves and have the work flow out of him and have it not be shit.
His admiration might have been transparent if Hamlin had cared to look.
“Tell me, Hamlin,” Pimletz said, tentatively, not wanting his esteem to show any more than it has, “how do you do it?”
“What?” Already, Hamlin’s piece was about to be zapped to the copy desk.
“You know, think. Come up with that shit. Have it pour out of you on deadline.”
Fucker makes it sound like diarrhea, Hamlin thought. He tapped out a final, flashy keystroke for significance, sent his copy on down the line, and, done, swiveled back to Pimletz to rub his nose in it. “Axel,” he said, shaking his head, “you can’t imagine.”
No, he can’t. Or at least he hasn’t been able to. Yet. But he means to get there. And soon.
He sits at his makeshift desk in Terence Wood’s hearth and tallies his next moves. There’s the cut-and-paste job to be done on the stack of cheapie star bios piled on the bottom steps of the spiral staircase leading up to the loft, anecdotes to be culled from the Record-Transcript clip file and from an Internet search, but these are only filler. The real work will come in fabricating for Wood the kind of storiedfrenziedtortured existence that readers have come to expect from their celebrated auto-biographers. They don’t want the raw honesty; they just want the raw, and it is up to Pimletz to give it to them.
Happily, for Pimletz, his dilemma has become a showcase for the turbo-imaginings of his friend Hamlin. Better, a parlor game. In the months since Hamlin’s effortless recounting of the Durango myth, Pimletz has reached out for more of the same, and Hamlin has obliged: a three-way with Lucy and Desi, an aborted child with Natalie Wood, a quashed breaking-and-entering charge with RFK. Lately, Hamlin has become so amused by the possibilities that he sends them, unsolicited, by fax or e-mail. Pimletz never knows what he might find. Just today, he booted up the laptop and was greeted with an elaborate compound regarding Howard Hughes and a former child actress from the old Our Gang series.
Hamlin’s stories remind Pimletz of the game he used to make of his father’s leaving back when he was a kid—the at-home version of the game he used to spin at work writing off Rose Kennedy. His father, though, that was a whole other muddle. The asshole was gone pretty much at conception, far as Pimletz could ever determine. His mother used to say he was killed in a car accident, but, to Pimletz, he always was kidnapped by aliens, drawn and quartered by horse thieves, thrown from a speeding train by Russian spies. Even after he learned the truth, that his old man was just a shit, Pimletz couldn’t keep from imagining a different twist: food-poisoned at his own sister’s wedding, felled by a Sears air conditioner, struck dead by a Frank Malzone liner to the owner’s box at Fenway.
It’s the same thing with Hamlin. Pimletz doesn’t know what to do with the windfall of stories, but he is determined to make them all fit. They are instantly a part of the Terence Wood legacy, as told to Axel Pimletz. They belong as surely as if they had actually happened. Anyway, he’s got nothing else to go on, and a bunch of pages to fill, and a deadline to meet, so he’s hit on the not-too-original literary device of mixing them together in a loose, internal monologue, the whole business linked with self-aggrandizing and grade school punctuation. Probably, there are more ellipses in Pimletz’s thirty-seven pages than there on the New Releases: Nonfiction table at Barnes and Noble—and, thanks to Hamlin, more irrefutable bullshit.
The bleep of Wood’s remote phone echoes up the stone flue like a high-tech fart. There’s even an echo as the ring runs up the chimney so that it comes back again and again, sounding like the fart-around-the-campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, acted by droids. This is how it strikes the unimaginative Pimletz, and, for some reason, perhaps because he hasn’t been out of the cabin much, past couple weeks, perhaps because, developmentally, he’s moored back in junior high school, the connection strikes him funny. He covers his nose to amuse himself further.
“Yeah,” he says, the phone to his ear, his hands now away from his nose. “Pimletz.” He answers like he’s still in the newsroom, like that’s where he belongs.
“Axel,” he hears. “Good. I’m glad I got you.”
Pimletz is glad to be got.
Okay, so maybe Terence Wood wasn’t built to paint houses or fish commercially or work construction. He was built, that’s for fucking sure, but not for much. Hard labor and him, they don’t get along; hard living is about where it ends for him. And heavy lifting he can just forget about. For a while, just after his not entirely thought-out exit, his Polar heart rate monitor cast off into the sea with the rest of his Pathfindered belongings, he not-entirely thought through the idea of starting his own moving company, leasing a couple trucks, and hiring local college kids to do the jobs, but Grace talked him out of it. There’s not much in the way of coming and going up here in Maine, she convinced him, and, anyway, the folks who do move tend to move themselves.
About the only job left to him, at least the only one that didn’t have him exerting himself too terribly much or asking customers if they wanted fries with that, was this right here (and an acting job, to boot!): inhabiting the character costumes at Maritime Merrytime, the theme park by the sea. The people who run the place actually have gone and trademarked the tag line, “the theme park by the sea.” There’s a little TM trademark thingy on all the T-shirts and tote bags and signage, and it always strikes Wood as ludicrous every time he sees it. He gets this picture in his head of a team of Down East lawyers dressed in unnatural fibers discussing over some lunch counter how people would be climbing all over themselves to use a tag line like this one, how it would be smart to tie it up while they could. “The theme park by the sea”; that’ll be in play before you know it.
Funny, how things work out. This is what he did, and now this is what he does, and here he is, acting, ludicrous or no, dressed as Larry Lobster, posing for pictures with the thinned winter crowd of Merrytime visitors, trying to sign autographs with the foam rubber claws they’ve given him for hands. When he started out as Crabapple Jack, the cantankerous old fisherman with the corncob pipe, he didn’t have this trouble with the autographs; his hands were his own, but he worried people would recognize him underneath his flap-eared yellow rain cap. In the beginning, he worried constantly that he would be found out, but here especially. Everywhere else, he could fuse into the background, but at Maritime Merrytime, as Crabapple Jack, he was calling a little too much attention to himself. True, no one would have believed that an Academy Award-winning actor would willingly dress up in flea-infested costumes and greet tourists for six dollars an hour—forget a dead Academy Award-winning actor—but Wood couldn’t be too sure. Plus, he didn’t like the way the little kids always ran from him in terror, the way the bigger ones kicked him in the shins or asked him when it was he last had a bath, the way the parents pretty much ignored him. He wasn’t used to playing secondary characters, and he wasn’t about to start. Fuck, it just about killed him when he was asked to do it for real, in pictures.
He’s since put on about twenty pounds and nurtured a full growth of beard, which has come in a lot grayer than he hoped, almost white. There’s no way anyone would spot him for who he was, but he’s more comfortable draped in red polyster. He’s come to cherish the anonymity of the lobster suit. And it’s not just the anonymity that’s got him. Larry’s the character he was born to play. He’s the Mickey Mouse of shell fish, the star of the whole show, and Wood sometimes thinks his Larry Lobster is the best acting of his career. He believes this wholeheartedly, actually puts what he’s doing in context, compares it to the work he did under Kazan and Peckinpah, sees the connection he makes with the runny-nosed kids as a pure and wonderful and immediate thing, unlike any connection he’d ever made with any other audience, anywhere. It’s all so . . . right here. And now.
He wonders what that fucker Strasberg would have made of a gig like this. What freedom! What drama! Every day, it’s a full-bodied, fully realized performance, one that permeates his entire being when he’s out there. Inside that lobster suit, he is Larry. It’s not so much acting as reacting, he presumes, better, interacting. He’s constantly evolving, expressing emotions he never knew were available to him through nothing more than cloaked hand gestures and body language; he becomes a part of his environment and lets the environment claim a piece of him in return, and he does all of this without speaking a word.
It didn’t start out this way. For a while, after Crabapple Jack, they had Wood working the Libby Lobster suit (Larry’s girlfriend), and then he subbed a couple times for the guy who wears Crusty Crustacean. Once they even let him try out his own character, Scrod, the nebulous sea creature of uncertain form, although, it turned out, the Merrytime children preferred their villains to be somewhat more discernible. Scrod never made it past the few complaints it generated down at Guest Relations.
But Larry suits him. He’s on all the T-shirts and shorts and the pennants, and there are Larry Lobster hats with wiry tentacles and shit. There’s even an interactive CD-ROM piece of crap, and Wood looks on at all the preexisting merchandise and sees himself. He is at the core of this particular universe, precisely where he belongs.
Maritime Merrytime is not much in the way of a winter attraction. On a scale of county fair to Disneyland, it barely registers, but it’s all they’ve got up here, and Wood can’t blame the owners for trying. They’ve got a pretty spot, hard by the national park and right on the water. The real estate must’ve cost them, and they’ve put some money into it. They’ve got a world-class rollercoaster, the Typhoon. They’ve got a local cable show, live action, featuring Larry and his pals, and they’re working on a syndication deal, but what they haven’t got is the weather. There’s not much of a pull during winter. Place is only open weekends from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and, if it’s particularly cold or if they’re expecting snow, they don’t open at all. It’s not worth it. Most of the outdoor rides—the Typhoon, Twister, the Wave, the Water Snake—are shut down for the season. All that’s left are the indoor arcade and the carousel and the live shows, the chance for kids to greet their favorite Merrytime characters without the hassle of the summer crowds. The real attractions for parents are the Lobster Pounds sprinkled throughout the park, serving enormous lobster rolls and lobster salad platters and lobster claws at enormously reasonable prices.
And, as ever, there is the Catch of the Day, also trademarked, the Merrytime ritual wherein one unsuspecting young guest is scooped up in a big fishing net and placed in a giant lobster trap by the Dancing Waters fountain at the main entrance to the park. The idea is that the sea-dwelling characters are turning the tables on their land-dwelling friends. Get it? (It took Wood a while.) If people can go fishing, there’s no reason Larry and his pals can’t go “peopling.” There’s even a song to signal the charade: “We’re a-goin’ peopling, a-peopling, a-peopling. We’re a-goin’ peopling, a-peopling today.”
The owners defend the practice by suggesting that it gets children to think responsibly about the sea and by reminding customers that if they don’t want to participate, they can avoid the performance. Besides, they insist, it’s all in good fun. Everything about Maritime Merrytime is all in good fun, even the miscalculations. The lobster trap is friendly enough looking, done up in bright colors (anything but the beaten-down hues of the briny deep!), and filled with pillows and Merrytime comic books and good things to eat. At the end of the day, the caught kid and his family are treated to a free dinner and T-shirts and set loose in the park for an hour after it closes, but there is no changing what it is.
It falls to Larry and a half-dozen Helper Crabs to do the trapping. Wood can usually tell, when the Catch of the Day song starts to play on the loudspeakers and he begins to circle the park with his giant net, which kids would make good candidates for Merrytime’s all-in-good-fun brand of cruel and unusual punishment. The chickenshits usually run for the safety of their parents’ legs or hide behind the trashcans, while the ones who are into it tend to chase after Larry with their hands in the air, yelling, “Pick me! Catch me, Larry! I want to be caught!”
If he can, Wood looks for a kid somewhere in-between, someone too cool to hide, but nicely terrified of the prospect. Today, though, as on most winter days, he must catch what he can. He sifts through the slim pickings and lands on a six- or eight- or ten-year-old kid (he can never tell) with a Marcus Camby/UMass jersey worn proudly over the outside of his down jacket. The jersey reaches to the kid’s knees like a skirt, and it gets in the way of his fleeing at the site of Larry Lobster and the Helper Crabs. The kid’s clearly not game for this particular game, but he runs awkwardly in his heavy winter coat and the stretched-over and loose-hanging jersey. Wood doesn’t move that easily in his costume either (the suit weighs another twenty pounds on top of the additional twenty he’s been carrying), but he doesn’t have it in him to redirect himself. It’s his job to catch this kid, but it is also his nature.
A-peopling, he wonders if he ever chased after Norman in something like this way, if he ever mistook his laughter for fear, if he was more inclined to respond to his own kid’s signals than he is to these kids’ in the park. He works to remember what it was like to be a father to a small boy, to matter—hell, not just to matter, but to matter like nothing else in the world has ever mattered, to have whatever it is the kid is going through to matter right back. He connects with these kids, but he can’t connect with his own, can’t for the new life of him reach back across the great divide he’s dynamited into their worlds and set right the pendulum.
For a moment, Wood loses himself in thinking how he might make repairs with Norman, to reconnect without doing any further damage—Jesus, it’s been three months, and he still hasn’t told him!—but he’s gone for that one moment, just. Introspection and him, they also don’t get along. Besides, he’s got a show to do.
The Helper Crabs lift the poor Marcus Camby fan carefully into the net, which Larry Lobster and his crustacean pals have balanced on their shoulders like pallbearers, impervious to the near screams and mild flailings of today’s Catch. Kid’s parents are no help, either. Dad’s got the video camera out and Mom’s pushing two kid siblings into the frame, and everyone else is milling uncomfortably around the fountain, waiting for what will happen next to just come on and happen so they can get back to their own dysfunctions.
The little boy is resisting, big time, but Wood and the crabs struggle to get him into the trap. Kid’s not screaming or fighting back, but he dead weights himself to where anyone paying attention can see he’s being moved against his will. The boy’s mother, who apparently is, crosses the square to her netted son. When Wood catches sight of her, late, his first thought is she’s going to make this even more difficult. This happens, sometimes. Once, in late fall, some burly looking goon in an “I’m with Dickhead” T-shirt with an arrow pointing to his crotch, stepped purposefully to Wood and kicked him in the groin—or, at least, in the place where he thought he might find groin on a lobster. The only things that saved Wood were the goon’s evident misunderstanding of marine biology and the costume designer’s evident inattention to detail. Also, Wood’s relative lack of peripheral vision inside the Larry suit likely prevented him from retreating in fear in the moment before the attack and likely saved him from a more-than-necessary embarrassment.
“Just don’t give him any ice cream,” the woman whispers into what may or may not be Larry’s ear, as if this had been Wood’s secret plan.
Wood holds up his claws so that they frame his costumed face in sharp parentheses: a lobster’s shrug.
“He’s lactose intolerant,” the woman explains.
Wood nods, as if to give his word that he will do no such thing, and turns back to the boy. As Larry Lobster, he is unable to speak—it’s one of the basic rules of employment, that the actors inhabiting the Merrytime characters not make a sound—and so the only assurances he can offer his unwilling participant must be delivered through foam-rubbered gesticulation. He pats at the air with his claws to suggest to the boy that he calm down; he holds a pincer to his lobster lips, to suggest quiet; he rubs the boy gently on the back to make nice; he borrows the camcorder from the neck of the boy’s father and motions the Dad into a shot with his son. He acts like he has never acted before, and the rare and wonderful thing about it, for Terence Wood, is that the boy plays off of him as if it all were real, as if Larry Lobster and the Helper Crabs were truly holding him against his will.
When the kid is finally trapped and hushed, and his family no longer fascinated by the photo opportunities, and the few other tourists diverted by the few other attractions, and Wood is momentarily full of himself and his ability to improvise with a crowd of oblivious tourists, it occurs to the great actor to break for lunch. His twenty new pounds have come mostly from the all-he-can-eat lobster rolls, and he’s learned to get them while he can. He retreats to the employee entrance at the main Lobster Pound by the Dancing Waters fountain, where he is handed a brown paper bag with Larry’s face on it, which he, in turn, carries awkwardly between the pressed-together heels of his claws to the fenced-in employee picnic area out back. Another basic rule is never to be seen eating or drinking or ducking into the bathroom or engaging in otherwise human behavior. The ducking into the bathroom part is never a problem for Wood because it’s such a bitch to get in and out of the lobster costume that it’s not worth his trouble. He goes without fluids so that he might go without peeing, although he wonders what it will be like inside the Larry suit in the heat of summer. The thing about his wondering is that he lets himself go out that far. Here it is, late January, and he’s already out to June in his head. Last time he was this settled was basically never.
Grace, from outside his limited vision: “That you in there?” She taps at his lobster head.
“Grace of my heart!” he says, surprised to see her. They are the first words he’s spoken all morning, and his voice comes out scratched, as if from sleep. He sounds far away underneath his thick Larry head.
“Thought I’d bring you something to eat,” she announces, fumbling under his lobster chin for the tucked-away buttons and zipper so that she might unfasten his lobster head and tilt it back like a hood. It is not a chore Wood can perform for himself, not without undoing the intricate lacing on the costume gloves (although this last is not something he can do for himself, either), and Grace doesn’t like the thought of someone else performing such an intimacy on her Harlan. She takes the bag from his claws and sets it aside. “They put so much mayo in that stuff I’m surprised you can taste the lobster,” she says. “I’m surprised your cholesterol isn’t off the chart.”
“What’s instead?”
“Instead is tuna, like you like it.”
Like she thinks he likes it is with Miracle Whip, which Grace insists is better for his cholesterol than mayonnaise, and chopped-up celery on whole wheat. The chopped-up celery pieces are like hidden enemies when he finds them in his mouth, and, with his claws, he won’t be able to pick at the gristle they leave behind in his teeth. But this is the way they do tuna down at Two Stools, and he doesn’t have it in him to carp. “You spoil me,” he says, not insincerely, getting his voice back, wiping at his brow with the synthetic fur of his costumed sleeve. “You’re not careful, I’ll never leave.”
“Then I won’t be too careful.” She takes over on the brow-wiping with one of the coarse napkin squares from the dispensers down at the coffee shop, but it feels to Wood like she’s leaving behind scratch marks. Then she licks her thumb and slicks down his graying eyebrows, which she’s told him tend to go all wild and absent-minded professorish when he’s been inside the suit a couple hours. “You want your hands?” she says, taking his lobster mitts in her own meaty paws.
“No,” he says, “don’t have time. They want me back there to check on that kid.”
“I can feed you,” Grace offers, “if you want.”
“I want,” he says. “I want, I want, I want.” He opens his mouth like a small child.
Grace pinches bites of the tuna with celery on whole wheat and places them tenderly in Wood’s mouth. They make an uncertain picture, the two of them. To a Merrytime colleague looking on in the employee picnic area, with the way Wood’s fake Larry head is tilted back and his real Wood head angled also to receive the tiny sandwich bites, he must appear helpless, attached, and Grace like a mother bird returned to her nest to feed her babies. To Grace, she is simply caring for the man she loves in the only way she knows; it doesn’t occur to her how it looks. To Wood, eating, how it looks is everything, and how it looks to him is like that scene in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the one where a recalcitrant Malcolm McDowell opens wide to collect the succor that is his due. He doesn’t like this picture, but he can’t shake it, and every time he swallows a bite of tuna sandwich, he opens his mouth and waits for the next one, like he has it coming, like Malcolm McDowell; he can’t help himself.
Grace doesn’t have it in her to notice. All she knows is she at last has a reason to duck out during the lunch rush at the coffee shop; that her two Lennys have the place basically under control; that this giant of a man in the red lobster suit has somehow found enough to like about her to stay put, even if he hasn’t come entirely clean; that without her here to feed him her Harlan would just melt away inside that suit; that he waits without asking for her to open the can of Arizona Iced Tea she’s brought with her from the coffe shop, diet peach, and twirl the angled straw to his lips.
“You sure you don’t mind?” Pet asks for the third or fourth time, taking off her coat and absurd winter hat, shaking out her hair to set it right. “I’m not interrupting?” She moves as if it doesn’t matter whether or not she is.
“No,” Pimletz says, his own mess of hair quickly fingered through to where it doesn’t look too bad. “I could use the distraction.”
“Yeah, like there’s not enough for you to do without me dropping by.”
“Technically, you called first,” Pimletz corrects, trying to put this stunning Petra Wood person at ease. He’s even taken by the absurd hat, figures it’s something the beautiful people are wearing these days. He gives her the benefit of every doubt, and a few more he hasn’t even considered. Petra Wood is, after all, a kind of client; he serves at her pleasure, hers and Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven’s, on behalf of Wood’s kid. If they don’t like what he writes, he’ll never see that second twenty-five thousand. “That shouldn’t count as just dropping by,” he sucks up. “That should be for something, that calling.”
“From the car phone,” Pet insists. “I called from the car phone. In the drive. Right outside. Any decade but this, that’s just dropping by.”
Pimletz gets that it’s important to her that she just dropped by, and he lets it alone. The woman did live here, once. Probably, after the estate is all figured and he finishes the book and clears out, she’ll live here again. Her stuff is all around. She shouldn’t have to call first.
Pet, after a beat, not about to miss another: “So, like, what page are you on?”
“Thirty-seven.”
Pet laughs like he’s kidding. “Fine,” she says. “Don’t tell me. Keep me in the fucking dark. It’s not like I’m the wife or anything.” She moves about the place as if she’s reorienting.
“Coffee?” Pimletz offers, not knowing how to act around this woman in her own home. “There’s instant.”
“Fuck coffee,” Pet says. “There’s wine somewhere, if you haven’t polished it.” She leads Pimletz into the kitchen. “There,” she says, pointing. “Top of the fridge. Can you reach?”
Pimletz reaches.
“Great,” she says, taking the bottle, dusting it off. “Friend of his had a vineyard up in Napa somewhere. Gentleman farmer type deal. Guy was an asshole, and his wine was shit, but Wood was always begging for cases. They did a Riesling one year, wasn’t too bad.” She rubs her hands together in a gesture of warming. “Jesus, it’s cold in here,” she says, even though it’s not. She switches subjects like channels, Pimletz is getting. Like Hamlin. “This is how you keep it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, presses her hands to her face. “They’re, like, ice cold,” she announces. “Feel.”
She touches the backs of her hands, both, to the sides of Pimletz’s cheeks, also both, and he pulls back, thinking, this is not what’s supposed to happen. Terence Wood’s wife is not supposed to be touching me on the cheek, in a cabin, in the woods, no one around for miles. Her hands are cold, but they’re cold from outside, from the car, and against her cold, heavily ringed fingers, his face feels like the kind of brown paper towel that gets dispensed in public rest rooms.
He needs to switch his own channels, move this encounter back to a show he’s seen before. Wine. He can’t find a corkscrew, makes an elaborate show of his looking. “Any ideas?” he finally says. “Swiss army knife?”
“Here.” Pet reclaims her hands, sniffles as if she must, grabs the leather duffel she’s slung over the knobbed back of one of the kitchen chairs, and pulls from it a worn pocketknife with a dull corkscrew folded to its side. “Try this.” She hands the knife and the bottle to Pimletz, and, in the exchange, the cold of her hands shoots through his fingers and once again sets him to distraction.
Focus, he tells himself. “That’s it?” he asks, meaning (he thinks) the pocketknife. Focus.
“Nothing more, you know, dedicated? That thing they bring to your table at the restaurants? What the hell do they call that?” He’s fishing here, Pimletz is, trying to seem on top of things.
“This is it,” Pet sings. “We’re roughing it, we’re making do.” She does a twirl about the place, like a trade show model for a kitchen convention. “Place’s not exactly outfitted,” she says, meaning the kitchen. “Might have to drink it straight from the bottle.” She crosses to a stool by a kitchen counter, brings her fit legs with her to the small oval seat, hugs them to her chest, keeps talking: “Me and my dead husband’s ghostwriter, swapping spit, talking ’bout how it was.” She seems to Pimletz entirely too cheerful for an encounter such as this, although, in truth, he’s got no idea what the appropriate levels of cheer might be. He’s got no idea about the appropriate levels of anything.
He sinks the rusted corkscrew into the cork and does what he can, but the bottle had been on its end and the cork gone dry and the stopper goes all crumbly when he tries to pull it out. There are tiny pieces of cork all over the up-high countertop in front of him—a whole litter!—and he considers these as his head fills with bad ideas on how to salvage the situation. “Cork’s gone bad,” he says, stalling, hoping his virtually unannounced guest will find some reason to reach for the bottle and brush her hands up against his, just one more time, pleasepleaseplease.
“I’m guessing you were never a waiter,” Pet says, taking the bottle back from Pimletz (and grabbing only glass!) and pushing the cork down past the neck with a still fused-together pair of take-out chopsticks. She finds these in a drawer by the sink, where Pimletz has let them accumulate.
“What about the cork?” Pimletz wants to know.
“It’s just cork,” she says, working the last of the stopper down the bottleneck. “Not like it’ll choke you or anything.” She brings the bottle to her mouth and takes a long pull, and the wet, left-behind glisten on her lips is enough to make Pimletz forget about her hands. He wonders if her lips are cold. Then she sets the bottle down on the counter, brings her hand to her mouth, and spits cork into her cupped fingers. She does this with a kind of artful poise that belies the act itself. “Pretend it’s pulp,” she says. “Okay? It’s just pulp. It’s fresh-squeezed orange juice and there’s just some pits and some pulp. That’s all. Strainer didn’t do a very good job.” She pushes the bottle across the counter to Pimletz. “Join me?” she says.
He wasn’t expecting his mother.
Last he spoke to her, she was running on about how busy they were at work, she and Nils, about how things were really taking off, and wouldn’t it be great if Norman could just scoot on up there for the weekend (just scoot on up there, that’s just how she said it), maybe help out a bit, go out on a couple calls. She talked about everything but what she meant to talk about. It’d be a good chance to get together, she said, get things back to normal. Norman was thinking, Yeah, like, this is pretty much the first thing on my list to do, to scoot on up to New Hampshire, to suck the dust and muck and apple pie from the rugs of Mr. and Mrs. Smalltown U.S.A. Yeah. If this is normal, he’ll be someplace else.
Still, he’s glad to see her—here, now—landed in the not-quite vestibule area of his shitty little apartment late in the day, with an oversized package wrapped in plain brown paper and criss-crossed packing string, like on a cake box, under her arm. The thing is too big for her to carry comfortably, and so she’s got a couple fingers curled under the taut packing string, which serves as a kind of handle, except that it cuts off her circulation at the knuckles and tears at her skin. It’s not the best arrangement, but it’s how she managed up the few flights of stairs.
“What’s that?” Norman says, noticing.
“No hug? No how are you, dear mother? What the hell kind of sewer were you brought up in?”
“Nice, Mom,” he says, collecting her for a hug, helping her to set down her package. “This is the way you talk around your Nilsy?”
Anita smiles at him like they’ve both been caught smoking. This is her new thing. The tension between Nils and Norman has troubled her since the beginning, and it’s worse since Wood’s gone. Lately, she’s chosen to play it from both sides. She doesn’t want to get into it, and so she dances around it on the theory that if it isn’t there, it isn’t there. When she’s with Norman, she adopts a kind of conspiratorial tone, as if she would like to acknowledge that her new husband is about an inch short of ridiculous, but would prefer it if she and Norman could just keep this fact to themselves. When she’s with Nils, she’s a little too quick to join him in his subtle castigations. They are hard on Norman together; they worry what to do about him. “He’s got this thing about casual profanity,” she says, back in us-against-him mode. “Nils. You know that.”
“Too well, mother dear,” Norman says, hugging still. “Too fucking well.”
“Norman!” She slaps him on the butt, playfully, the way a mother would her teasing child.
“Enough of this shit-chat,” he says, emphasis front, pointing once again to the oversized package. “What’s in the bag?”
“What’s in the bag is just a little something,” Anita announces. “Plus, it’s not a bag. It’s a package. You’re just like your father. It wouldn’t kill you to be a little more precise.”
No, Norman thinks, but maybe it’s what killed him. He doesn’t know what this means, except that it is something to think. Certainly, the Woodman was never known for his precision. There was nothing exact about his father that Norman can call to mind.
Anita leans the bagged package against the wall. “Been lying around the house,” she explains. “Thought you might like to have it.”
Norman slips the taut string over a corner of package and struggleslides the loop down its length. Then he tears at the brown paper wrapping, and from underneath the tear—from, like, before he’s even got the paper all the way ripped off and bunched to the ground—he catches his father’s eyes staring back at him, and the immediate effect is that he’s being watched, as ever. It hits him like one of those forgettable Vincent Price horror movies, the ones with the long-forgotten family portraits hanging over dusty mantels, the eyes moving predictably about the room, catching everything.
He is momentarily alarmed.
“Here,” his mother says, reaching for the package to open it the rest of the way. “Let me.”
Norman has to step back a couple paces to take it all in. There, behind the promise of Panavision, is the Woodman himself, as advertised, in a lobby poster for These Things Happen, a fairly unnoticed Paramount effort with Sebastian Cabot and a young Ann-Margret. Norman tries to figure the date from the fine print, but it’s laid out in Roman numerals, and he can’t get much past the MCM. They didn’t teach Roman numerals in his fancy-ass school. Something something something. Early 1970s, he thinks. Whenever.
In the picture, Wood played an Indy race car driver, Trim Tompkins, whose broken-down car couldn’t quite handle the drill, and the drive of the movie was the way Trim kept patching his vehicle with spit and hope and plugging on. The Little Engine That Could with fast cars and too-tight jeans and early-1970s sex. Ann-Margret played the love interest, the daughter of some motor oil executive whose company was sponsoring Trim’s car, and Sebastian Cabot the pit boss. What stayed with Norman, other than the incongruity of seeing his beloved Mr. French in garage overalls, was the way this Trim Tompkins refused to be beaten down. It was so unlike his father, a man who would have kicked and screamed and somehow managed to trade his broken-down race car for a new set of wheels just before the starting gun. He was never the type to shoulder his rough circumstances and hope for the best. He was the loud asshole at the front of the line getting what he wanted, never the shrinking sap at the back willing to acquiesce.
In the poster, there’s Wood underneath a store-bought frame in racing gear, working his pretty boy smile, a helmet crooked under his arm. He was never much of a matinee idol, Terence Wood, but, for a while in there, also early 1970s, the studios were on him to make like Paul Newman and Ryan O’Neil, only he never could manage it without seeming like he was on the knowing side of an inside joke. They kept handing him these shit pictures, and he kept looking like he could just choke on the charm, like he knew something the rest of the planet couldn’t possibly imagine. It wasn’t him, but no one seemed to notice, or care, or think it was up to them to say anything about it. This poster, this Trim Tompkins, this isn’t him, but Norman takes it in as if it might have been. He loses himself in his father’s put-on smile and wonders what his life might have been like if the Woodman had been more conventionally Hollywood, on screen and off, more conventionally glamorous, but then he remembers what happened to Ryan O’Neil’s kid and thinks maybe he didn’t have it so bad. Least he’s never been in rehab. He wonders what his father was thinking when they took the shot, if he was thinking what it would be like to do good work again, what it would be like to have a kid, to matter.
“I thought, you know, the title,” Anita says, tentatively, trying to pull her son back into the moment. “These things happen.” She pauses to get Norman to consider the deep meaning of the phrase. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“Oh, Mom, please,” Norman says.
She throws up her arms as if she doesn’t know what else to do. (She doesn’t.) “Excuse me for trying to make this make sense,” she says.
“It doesn’t make sense. That’s the whole point.”
“No, Norman. It has to. It has to mean something, his not being here.”
“Dying, Mom. The word is dying.”
“Fine, dying. It has to mean something.”
“Okay, then,” he challenges. “What does it mean? Go ahead. Enlighten me.”
Anita hadn’t thought things through to this point. She came to New York knowing only that they should talk about Wood’s death, but not knowing what to say. With Nils, at home, she gets to play it at the surface, but she wants to reach down deep when she’s with Norman. She’s talked about this with Pet. She wants to let Norman know the ache she feels for him, for what he’s lost. Hell, for what she’s lost, too, but a lot of that is tied up with what Norman’s going through. She wants to put it in a place where it will touch her without leaving her spent, hopeless, obscured. Still, she can’t think what to say. “Why does everything have to be so confrontational with you?” she finally manages.
Now it’s Norman’s turn to have nothing to say. He crosses the not-quite vestibule to his mother and collects her once again in a hug. He’s never liked to see her upset, now especially. Hugged, he helps her out of her coat and then he folds it, inside out, and rests it on the floor. (He’s got no closets.) Then he takes the framed poster in one hand and his mother in the other and leads her to the not-quite living room, where he searches his cluttered walls for a spot to hang the poster. He wonders if his mother sees any irony in gifting to her only child a poster of his dead father dressed in racing gear, about to don a helmet and step into a defective car and drive off at great speed to an uncertain fate. He wonders if she makes the connection, if it’s even worth mentioning.
Harlan Trask, sleeping, takes up more room on Grace’s bed than there actually is. Or maybe it just seems that way. Or maybe it’s just how when he’s bushed, he drops onto the mattress at whatever angle he can most easily manage. However Grace looks at it, the man takes more than his share, and she sits at what’s left of the foot of the bed cataloging new ways to accommodate him. Don’t get her wrong, she’s not complaining or anything, but when she’s working late at the coffee shop, closing up, and he knocks off early after his shift at the park, she comes upstairs and there’s, like, no room.
It’s just a full, Grace’s bed, and even when it was just her, it sometimes felt a little too confining, so she’s willing to take that into account, but now that she’s got company long-term, it’s a serious crapshoot, getting comfortable. It’s out of hand. When they go to bed at the same time, if they’ve both been reading or messing around a bit or something, then it’s easy to drop off together before either one stakes out too much territory. Then it’s no problem because then she doesn’t have to worry about Harlan’s crazy angles, and anyway there’s always spooning, like normal people, even though they’re each about one hundred pounds north of normal people and their spooning is more like ladling.
She’s watched that show Roseanne for years, and now that it’s in reruns she’s watching it all over again. She’s never once noticed how Roseanne and Dan sleep in a full-size bed. Until lately. What’s that all about? They’re six hundred pounds between them, easy, and the producers have got them squeezed onto this tiny mattress, only Grace never paid good enough attention until she got this thing going with Harlan. Now she watches those bedroom scenes with Roseanne and Dan and fills with sympathy. They’re always in there talking about their kids or whatever problems they’re having; it’s, like, one of their regular sets, and now that she’s noticed, she can’t get past it. How can people not notice something like that?
Maybe they think it’s a blue-collar thing, the producers, this sleeping on a full-size mattress, or maybe it’s a queen, hard to tell on the television, but the way Grace sees it, it’s a logistical thing. It’s making the effort to make the change, it’s moving away from something old into something new. No way it’s a money thing, she’s thinking. The difference between full and king is probably no more than, like, fifty, sixty bucks.
They did a Sally Jesse on this, once. They had on this one big-sized couple, and they were saying how there wasn’t enough floor space in their bedroom for a bigger bed. And how, anyway, they were trying to hold back on any major expenses because they were trying to get enough of a stake together for a down payment on a house, and how it was just something they’d gotten used to. But she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see how people would choose to sleep this way. Once in a while, you know, okay. She can even deal with it for a short period of time, but she’s pretty much to the point where a new bed is a mandatory thing, only to bring it up, to bring herself to make a change, would be to bring up all kinds of other stuff. Getting a new bed now would tie in to whatever’s going on between them.
But maybe they do need to take a look at this thing long-term. It’s, like, way past indefinitely already. She loves her Harlan, but she needs her sleep. And so does he. That’s the thing. She can’t deny him that. She steps from the foot of the bed and lifts his feet by the ankles, lovingly, but also purposefully, and walks with them so that his whole body pivots to a right angle with the headboard. There, she thinks. That’s a little more workable. Then she slips his feet from the red furry pant legs the poor baby didn’t bother to take off after work. She moves like a mother doting on her child.
Then she pulls an afghan from the chair by the bed and covers him with it. She’s tried, on other nights, to slip the tucked-in sheets and quilt down from under his butt and then draw them back up and tuck them in again around him, but she doesn’t have the effort in her tonight. Plus, you know, it’s pretty nice out, not too cold, she’s got the windows cracked and everything. He’ll be fine with just the afghan.
Then she slips out of her own clothes, drops them in the pile on the floor of her closet, pulls from the pile the extra large Maritime Merrytime night shirt she’s worn now for a couple nights running, and slides away the hangered clothes to get to the videos she keeps stacked on a shelf in the back. Something she hasn’t seen in a while, she’s thinking, something to take her back. She thumbs through her library of mostly store-bought titles, although, for a while, she was pretty good about keeping blank tapes in the apartment, studying the TV Guide, and dubbing some of those hard-to-find old movies straight from the cable. She bought the tapes six to a box, sometimes ten, whatever was on special down at Blockbuster. Turned out to be a real money-saver. She pulls out a few of the store-bought tapes to read the thumbnailed storyline and reviewers’ comments on the back, but settles finally on one of her homemade dubs that definitely could stand another viewing. It’s been a while. Then she slides back the clothes, closes the closet door, crosses to the big-screen television, and presses the videotape into the VCR.
Usually, she likes to keep a couple months cushion between her repeat viewings. Any longer and she loses the familiarity she cherishes; any shorter and it’s like a broken record. There’s a fine balance. She wants to feel connected to the movie, like the characters know her, but not to where her knowing them gets in the way. She likes to space it out so that she doesn’t remember the dialogue, or the subtle plot twists, or who might turn up in a supporting role, or whatever. She knows what happens, but she doesn’t want to know what happens. She likes to be surprised in her own small way, and, tonight, in her own small way, she surprises herself.
She’s been too long away from this one, and she wonders why. Actually, she knows why; she just wonders. She listens to the lone violin at the start of The Half Shell. The simple melody has rarely left her head since the first time she saw it back at the Tivoli, back when there were lightbulbs on the marquee, back when you couldn’t hear the loud action from the movie playing in the theater next door because there was no such thing as the theater next door, and on through the years, when the only way to see it was at the revival house in Bangor, or on late-night television, cut up by Ginsu knives and time constraints. When the rest of the orchestra comes in behind the solo, and the theme song swells, and the opening credits roll, she looks over toward her too-small bed and her sleeping hulk of Harlan Trask and wonders when he’ll get around to telling her.