Pimletz can’t get over it. Really, stuff like this never happens to him, and it’s been so long in not happening, he’s begun to think it never really happens to anyone else, either.
What it is, though, he isn’t sure. How it started is about the best he can do. How it started was one afternoon, day after she arrived, this Petra Wood person began inching a little too close for polite conversation. Closer and closer, to where Pimletz could almost taste her breath against his lips. She was all amazing looking and good smelling, and it’s possible he was reading more into her behavior than she was putting out, but he didn’t think so. It was a little obvious, even to Pimletz, a man to whom a double-talking politician might seem a surprise. That she was like something out of one of those lingerie catalogs he keeps around his apartment didn’t help, but even if she’d been plain, his imagination still would have managed to get ahead of him. At his depth, he can’t rule anyone out.
It started right away. Subtly, but right away. Or maybe not so subtly, but still. First it was just Petra Wood touching her hands to Pimletz’s face to show how cold it was. But then it was leaving the bathroom door ajar while she was toweling off after a shower, leaning over Pimletz while he was at his desk, not writing, in such a way that her breasts were made to brush suggestively against his head. It was Petra telling him her heart was beating super fast after lifting a wicker trunk filled with old magazines and pulling his open hand to her chest so that he might feel for himself, sharing unsolicited intimacies regarding Terence Wood’s sexual prowess and her appetite for same. (“You need to know this,” she kept saying, “don’t you, Axel? I mean, for the book?”) It was Petra asking if he kept any C batteries in the cabin because she’d brought with her a small bedroom appliance, she claimed to be embarrassed to admit—her little joystick, she called it; said she never travels without it—which seemed to be running out of gas. “Even us grieving widows need a poke every once in a while,” she said, playing at sheepish, holding out her rebatteried dildo like it was medicine.
She decided she’d stay a couple days, long as she’d made the trip, long as there was nothing else doing, and there was plenty of room. Pimletz assured her she wouldn’t be in the way, but, in truth, he wasn’t sure he could get past the distraction. Jesusmotherfuckingchristalmighty, it’s not like you have to beat him over the head with what’s going on. He jerked off twice, maybe three times, the morning after the business with the cold fingers against his face and kept up the routine as Petra Wood kept up her temptations. He was determined to drain himself, to guard against the likely possibility of shooting his wad the moment she finally reached for him—a defensive maneuver he’d had to employ his entire pubic life, to be ready by not being ready.
For Pimletz, age and an extremely limited experience have done nothing to diminish the response time between sexual thought and dick-preparedness, and since there’s never any time between sexual thoughts, he is constantly prepared. He’s always reading these letters in the advice column in Playboy from these guys who can’t get it up, or hearing some talk radio caller with the same problem, or catching some episode of Montel about related dysfunctions, but, with him, it’s the other way; he can’t keep it down. He’s hard all the time, for the slightest reason, for no reason at all. He gets hard watching those Nice ’n Easy, Tender Loving Care shampoo commercials, or Tipper Gore giving a speech, or Dominique Moceanu straddling the balance beam at the Olympics. He gets hard watching Jessica Rabbit—a fucking cartoon! And it’s not just a naked-woman-in-the-shower type thing, or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, or a finely drawn piece of animated ass; it’s the idea of any physical contact that gets him going. Apparently, it doesn’t even have to be human.
He’s got no control of himself in this area, to where even a trip to the doctor’s office for his annual physical leaves him wondering if his dick will turn him in. He jerks off before the appointment (by his calculation, it should be within an hour or so), so that when the guy examines him for testicular cancer or whatever the hell it is he examines him for, he doesn’t show any interest. That would just be too weird. That would just be the bottom of the bottom. He’s thought about switching to a female doctor, but then he thinks that would just be a too-weirdness of a different kind. What if she’s old, like sixty or something, and she goes to examine him, and he just loses it, right there?
It’s the same when he goes to buy pants and has to be measured for alterations, except with the tailor he doesn’t have to piss himself clean to wash away any of the residual semen to make sure he’s presentable down there. Jesus, he would just shit if the doctor spied any caked-over come at the tip of his cock (and, with a lady doctor, he’d shit and die!), but, with the tailor, it’s just about avoiding any telling bulges, any movement.
He’s thought this problem through to the floorboards, Pimletz has, although it never helps when the real deal presents itself. When the real deal comes, he’s a force of nature. Here he is, thinking he’s walking around the cabin with nothing left, but Petra Wood at last presses herself against him from behind and starts to nibblesuck at his ear, and he’s variously thinking how stuff like this never happens to him, and how he hopes the ear cheese that has surely formed on the ridge between ear and skull since his last shower is not too terribly noticeable, and how during that last shower, just this morning, he should probably have jerked off one last time, just to be sure, because already the skin of his cock is stretched so taut he’s thinking it might crack.
“How about a little break, Axel Pimletz?” Petra Wood says, his ear still in her mouth, her voice reaching him as if through an imbalanced Walkman. “All work and no play, Axie,” she says. She lets go the ear and walks a tight half-circle to face Pimletz from the front. She keeps a hand to his clothes as she walks around like he’s a fucking maypole, which, in a way, he might be.
“Remember that line?” she continues, “From The Shining? From the way Nicholson just kept writing it and writing it, over and over? Page after page, it was just the same thing. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ ” She makes her voice smaller with each repetition, appending ellipsis to her performance. He gets the idea, but she keeps going. ‘ “All work and no play. . . . ’ ”
She starts in playing with his hair, removes his glasses, moves on to the next thing: “I’ll tell you something. What he saw in that Shelley Duvall, I’ll never know. We met her once at some charity function, and her mouth was, like, way too big for her face. You think? In person, it’s like way too big for her face.”
Pimletz doesn’t think, or at least he’s never thought about it, and now that he’s been made to, he’s not much interested beyond supposing it is so. For a beat, he’s thinking the obvious Jack Nicholson impression is a back-handed hint that he get moving on this Wood manuscript, implying as it does that even a deranged Jack Nicholson was able to compile hundreds of pages of the same fucking sentence, while Pimletz has only managed a repetitive thirty-seven, but mostly what he’s thinking, now, is that his ear’s a little too wet for him not to dab at it, maybe with his sleeve or with a casual brush back of his hair, but he doesn’t want to get caught at it and leave this woman thinking he’s dabbing at his too wet ear. She might get insulted, and he’s also thinking, Axie? No one’s ever called him Axie, and it never occurred to him anyone might. Mostly, though, he’s thinking he needs to reach into his jeans to adjust himself. He’s angled in the wrong way, pointing down, so that when Petra Wood entered the room and got him going, his straightaway swelling cock pressed up against his boxers and jeans like it was trying to lift weights.
He allows himself a small joke by association—just a punchline to start, something about the “clean and jerk,” a simple weightlifting maneuver, but then he marries it to the soaped tug and pull of his morning showers—before returning to his dilemma.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he’s got no choice but to say, standing, turning his back to Pet and reaching into his jeans to right himself.
Pet, noticing, fills the few paces between them. “Here,” she says. “Let me.” She turns Pimletz to face her and reaches for his belt, only when she unloops the front end and drags the hasp back through its hole, she sees that maybe she’s too late. Or, too soon.
(Better, too much.)
“Jesus,” Pimletz says, coming, crazy at the thought of this exotic Pet reaching for his pants as much as at any actual friction occasioned by her reaching. He can’t help himself. “Jesus,” he says again.
Pet rubs at him through his jeans—she doesn’t want not to participate, after all—and purrs wetly in his ear and keeps rubbing until he’s well past through. “It’s okay, baby,” she purrs. “It’s okay.”
“Fuck!” Pimletz cries out, done, pissed at himself for not keeping control. He slams his hand into the cabin wall in an embroidered show of frustration. He hurts his hand doing this, his friction hand, but he wants to sell the point that this isn’t how things usually are with him, that he’s as surprised as she is. What the hell is this all about? he means to suggest. Hey! When the hell was the last time a couple layers of denim and cotton-polyester weren’t enough to keep a grown man from spilling himself at the near touch of an amazing-looking woman? Tell him that.
“It’s okay,” Pet says again. She strokes at his hair with one hand, finishes with his belt with the other. She’s up so close against him he can smell the fabric of her clothes, the kind of shampoo she uses, and Pimletz is so caught up in her smells and his disappointment he doesn’t notice what she’s doing, not at first. She unbuttons his jeans, slips her hand under his shorts and around to his ass, slides his pants down over his hips. He doesn’t know how to tell her to stop.
“You must be a mess,” Pet says sweetly, somehow producing a moist (and somehow hot) towel and working it tenderly around his dick and balls, like a waitress in a deservedly popular Japanese restaurant. The towel reaches his spent cock like a redemption, a forgiveness.
Jesus, this woman comes prepared, Pimletz thinks. Not him. He just comes.
“I was in a band once,” she says, out of nowhere, working her towel, “back in school, we called ourselves Nocturnal Emission, we did a song about this. ‘Emission Control.’ Get it? It’s like a play on words. Nocturnal Emission? Emission Control?” She looks to see if he does. “It was like our theme song. That, and ‘Emission Impossible,’ which was like the flip side to the whole deal.”
She looks up at Pimletz, gets back nothing, continues. “Oh, don’t mind me. It’s just, you know, you reminded me.” She seems to drift off, onto another line of thinking, but then she’s back: “God, I haven’t thought about that in years. I was on drums, can you believe it? A girl drummer, back then.” She bunches the towel and tosses it aside, then drops to her knees and takes him in her mouth and works him like a mother cat. She licks at the messed hair around his balls like he’s a kitten in for his bath, like it’s her privilege. Her tongue is warm against his wet skin, the inside of her mouth like the mattress side of his pillow.
“Nice,” Pimletz says, thinking he needs to keep up his end.
Pet isn’t listening. She’s back in school, banging the skins, rocking the house. She starts to sing: “If you can’t come when you’re invited, what’s the point of coming at all?” It’s the chorus, apparently, so she sings it again and again. It’s one of those songs that just drifts away, so this time her ellipsis is a fade. She looks up, sung, to see how Pimletz is doing. “Maybe you saw us?” she wonders. “We were up at Smith, but we played Boston all the time. The Rat. The Paradise. Some place in Cambridge, I can’t remember. Late seventies, around in there. Girl groups were pretty happening. The Pretenders. Blondie. All those strung-out chicks.” She laughs. “Hey, the Strung-Out Chicks. That’s what we should’ve called ourselves.”
Pimletz can’t think what to say. He looks down at this amazing-looking woman with his dick near her mouth and thinks if he had a million bucks for every time he found himself in this pose with a woman in that one he’d still be scrambling to make his rent.
“It’s okay, Axel,” she says, standing to face him. She’s back in the moment now, back to her soothing. “It’s no biggie.” She laughs, not meaning to. “Sorry.”
“Thanks,” he says, smiling, as if he can laugh it off as well. “Thanks a whole fucking lot.”
“Sorry.”
Me too, Pimletz wants to say. Jesusfuckingchrist, him too.
Pet retreats to the back bedroom for her little joystick. It’ll just take a sec, she tells Pimletz. They can finish her off, you know, if he doesn’t need to get back to work. Pimletz stands there, momentarily alone, his pants bunched around his ankles. He’s replaying what just happened, fast-forwarding to the next scene with the dildo and the finishing her off, and he’s hard in his head, but nowhere else.
Norman can’t write the truth without understanding the scene. It’s easier for him to visualize the piece if he sees himself in the role, if he sees the set, the props, the particulars. It’s a layering kind of process. Right now, it’s just Norman Wood in his shitty little apartment, but the effect is the same. The juice of the story is Norman and Woodman, but it’s also about Norman and Brian Dennehy, or, as it turns out, maybe Charles Durning, or whoever he gets to play his father. It’s about what’s missing, now, in their relationship, what will be forever lost to Norman with his father’s passing. But it’s also about how much easier it will be to film the relevant scenes if he confines his search for these missing and lost aspects inside his apartment, just, if there’s no reason to take the story anywhere else. He reaches for the truth of his own story, but he’s careful not to let his reach exceed his budget.
This is how he works. This is how everyone works around here. It’s this, or get nailed. The deal is, he’s supposed to produce a shooting script by the end of next week—forty pages, tops, it’s just a short—and yet he’s managed only a couple sketchy scenes. He knows what he wants to say, what’s universal in his relationship with the Woodman, but he doesn’t know how to narrow the focus. They’ve taught him this, in theory, but he doesn’t get it. (Not just in theory, but in Theory, an actual class.) He wants to tell the whole story, all at once, fully-realized, but he’s stuck having to pick and choose from among his experiences. He gets these flashes in his head, these different scenes, and they have nothing to do with each other or with the piece as a whole, and what bogs him down is that the distance from where he is to where he wants to be is, like, way fucking long. He doesn’t see a solution.
Stuck, he flips on the television. Maybe a half-hour or so of tube will spark something for him, or at least leave his head sufficiently numbed that he might better recognize a new idea. Plus, he’s up for anything might keep him from writing. Always. Even Three’s Company. This is where he lands, so he gives it a try. This is Norman for you. He’ll grace even the most dubious entertainments with the benefit of his doubt. Maybe it’s because he grew up on the industry’s fringes, but he feels an obligation to watch what passes in his view. He knows the work that goes into it. He knows the people involved, or people who know the people involved. He owes it to them to watch.
He never noticed Three’s Company much as a kid. Its first run was a little ahead of his time, but the premise is somehow a part of him: this guy Jack pretends to be gay in order to fool his stuck-up landlords and live platonically with his two attractive female friends in a great apartment. Norman wonders how he knows this, but, more than that, how it passed the dozens of rewrites and story conferences and network suits to emerge as a viable concept for a situation comedy.
Here, now, Jack is dressed as a woman trying to pass herself off as a man, so he’s kind of back where he started with just this extra complication thrown in. It is not immediately clear to Norman how this complication came about or how it fits with this episode’s story, but he is mildly distracted by the effort. It all seems to matter to these earnest people on screen. There’s some shtick with Jack’s fishnet stockings underneath his suit trousers, with the way they show when he crosses his legs at a job interview. Then the camera cuts to show a dangling hoop earring left behind on his ear, and the laugh track lets on that this is funny. Norman is stuck marveling at the effortless physicality of the guy who plays Jack and at the difficulty he’s having with his own material. This, what he’s watching, seems written without a thought; this other thing, what he’s working on, has been thought through to the ground without his having written a word.
A commercial break lets him change channels without hurting anyone’s feelings, and he bounces remotely along the dial in search of diversion: infomercials, soaps, talk shows, old movies. Ah, here we go. On TNT, they’re showing True Grit. It looks from these first couple scenes like he hasn’t missed much. He sparks to the connection. Usually, with these old movies—late 1960s through, about, early 1980s—there’s a connection. With Wood gone, Norman can’t look through the cable listings without drawing a line from whatever’s showing to some aspect of his father’s career. It’s like that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, the one that holds that everyone in Hollywood is linked to Kevin Bacon by a flow chart of no more than six pictures. (His roommate is friendly with one of the guys who thought it up.) He maps his own path from Wood to Kevin Bacon: Sixes and Sevens, with Yul Brynner, who also appeared in The Magnificent Seven, with Steve McQueen, who also appeared in Papillon, with Dustin Hoffman, who also appeared in Kramer vs. Kramer, with Meryl Streep, who also appeared in The River Wild, with Kevin Bacon. There are shorter paths, but it’s more of a challenge by way of Papillon.
Norman and his film school buds have made the same game out of Woodman’s career. (They can get to Darth Vader and back in just four pictures!) He worked with everyone, by the time it was over, rubbed, in some way, against virtually every studio production. The True Grit connection is hardly once removed. Wood originally was signed to play the Glen Campbell part, actually showed up for the first day of shooting. But the story he told was that he got into this right-out-of-the-gate pissing contest with John Wayne, and when it became clear to Wood that the Duke was producing a mightier stream at that time in his career, there was nothing to do but kick up some dust and walk. Hal Wallis, the producer, had been an old friend until Wood’s walking caused this great falling out; as far as Norman knew, they never spoke again.
The more likely version was that Wood arrived on the set to find that True Grit was clearly John Wayne’s picture, and also that he wasn’t inclined to help him carry it. No way was he working in support of a bigger legend. Plus, it turned out to be a nothing role. For Glen Campbell, maybe it was a big deal, but for Wood it was insignificant. He might have known, but in the script he’d read, and in the novel on which it was based, there’d been a little more balance to the story. Wood seized on this as the basis for his dissatisfaction. Norman, when he was old enough to get what was going on, never understood his father’s surprise. Come on, he always thought, this was John Wayne. John Fucking Wayne, a goddamn legend. What the hell did the Woodman expect? What, he wanted the Duke to dilute the role of a lifetime to leave room in the picture for an upstart pain-in-the-ass like Terence Wood? Yeah, right.
The truth, Norman later found out, was that Wood had a hard-on for the Rooster Cogburn role and couldn’t stand that he wasn’t long enough in the tooth to battle it out for the lead. (The Duke had about twenty-five years on him!) No way he was gonna sit back and watch John Wayne act the shit out of a part that, in another lifetime, might have been his. Which was why Wood, unnominated, passed the Academy Awards ceremony in Squaw Valley that year, watching from a slopeside condominium with his first wife, Elaine, and the reaction shot to John Wayne’s best actor Oscar was the Woodman running outside to take a shit in the resort’s heated pool. He had to pay to have the pool drained, cleaned, and even regrouted, but he made all the papers, borrowed some of the wind at the Duke’s back, and made himself feel a little better at what he’d missed. It was never his to miss, but Wood didn’t see it that way.
Norman, watching, not thinking of his script, tries to imagine his father in the Glen Campbell part. There’s no easy fit, but he works at it. There’s no edge to Glen Campbell, no danger, and Wood was always a little wanting in the sweetness and hope departments. It would’ve been, like, a completely different picture, like It’s a Wonderful Life with Edgar G. Robinson as George Bailey. Toward the back of the movie, there’s this scene with Glen Campbell’s dead body being dragged along the plains by his horse, and right away Norman flashes to an image of his father, body-bagged, being dragged down Sunset Boulevard by his beloved Pathfinder. It’s the weirdest thing, this leap from Glen Campbell to Woodman, from the horse to the sport utility vehicle, but Norman worries it won’t leave him. It’s with him, still, when the closing credits roll, when he goes to shut off the television manually and press his hand against the static of the screen. It’s with him as he crosses to his desk, to return to his script. It’s with him when he looks for something to eat in the refrigerator. It’s with him when he leaves the apartment for a slice of Ray’s down the street, or maybe a two-frank special at Papaya King up the block in the other direction. It’s with him, he’s guessing, for the next while.
Don’t talk to Grace about patience. Don’t get her going. She’s about had it with the wholesaler she’s been dealing with, the guy who delivers her milk and cheeses and ketchup and other foodstuffs. Some guy named Howie, tall drink of water, too big for his hats, calls from his cell phone to tell Grace he’s just around the corner, the kind of guy who actually refers to himself as a tall drink of water, who seems to be having entirely too much fun at a job that’s got no right being any fun at all.
She buys in bulk, naturally. There’s a standing order for three times each week—she doesn’t have the refrigerator space to go longer between deliveries—and on each pass this Howie’s supposed to leave two five-pound bricks of processed American cheese, presliced, one hundred sixty slices. Only, the last couple times, the cheese was all crusty at the edges and moldy in the middle and she could only salvage like fifty or sixty slices from the whole damn order, and even those she wasn’t so sure about. No one complained or anything, but for, like, a day or two in there, she was expecting a pissed-off call, or a summons. For, like, a week now, she’s had to send one of the Lennys to the Stop ’n’ Shop out by the highway for the individually wrapped Kraft slices, which run like a thousand dollars a pound, just so she can offer cheeseburgers, cheese omelets, and grilled cheese sandwiches to her good customers. Everyone else can just wait for this wholesaler to get his deliveries together, thank you very much.
The fisherman crowd, they’re a couple decades behind the rest of the world. They hear old Two Stools’s not serving cheeseburgers, and, right away, they’re into this old John Belushi routine from Saturday Night Live. It’s like a time warp. They’re clapping each other on the back, bellowing “Cheeseburgah, cheeseburgah, cheeseburgah,” doubled-up like they’ve never heard it before. Maybe they haven’t. Maybe the routine’s just come to them on its own. Maybe the joke’s been so long in the atmosphere, from all those reruns and retellings, that all the air’s been taken out of it, and it just touches down in their fishermen heads. “Cheeseburgah, cheeseburgah, cheeseburgah.”
Bar Harbor’s always been safely removed from the cutting edge—the kids up here are just now starting to wear Airwalks and flannels—but it’s like these fishermen haven’t been near a television set in decades. Ask any one of them—Mike, Lem, Chester—and he’ll tell you the only reason he hasn’t seen Carson on the Tonight Show past couple years is because he and the wife haven’t been staying up.
There’s a piece in the New Yorker—Grace’s subscription just started—about the geography of cool, about how, in matters of fashion and trends and music, New York and Los Angeles are generally a month or two ahead of Chicago and Boston and San Francisco, while cities like Dallas and Orlando and Indianapolis drag by another few months. She started reading the article, and she was thinking, you know, what with television and the Internet and movies and everything, the whole country should be wired pretty much the same, but it turns out it has to do with the way different types of people from different parts of the country respond to that wiring. It’s all tied up in how these different products are distributed, how they connect in each community. The article tells how it’s actually someone’s job (a marketing job, Grace guesses) to track how long it takes the huddled masses in each of our major metropolitan areas to catch on to the next big thing. There’s a whole formula for it, and Grace figures, if this is the case, then her particular corner of Maine must be about ready for disco and leisure suits. Even the phrase, the geography of cool, would be meaningless to her fishermen. They’d think she was talking about Canada.
Like with sneakers, okay, you’ve got your Nikes and your Reeboks and whatever else it is you see on those basketball player commercials, but, up here, everyone just wears what fits from the sale bin at Cuthbert’s Drug Store and Emporium. There’s the New Balance factory, but everyone knows at least one person who works there to poach on their employee discount, and, besides, they sell all the slightly damaged seconds down at the outlet store. There’s this one guy in town, one of her regulars, still wears the canvas P. F. Flyers he had back in high school. Salamander, they call him. Real name is Salmon, Jimmy Salmon, but he goes by Salamander, and his sneakers are shot through with holes, but they’re still on his feet. The point is, the day these good people have one hundred thirty-nine dollars to spend on a pair of sneakers is the day Grace wears a thong.
“Chester,” she says, leaning over the fishermen to bus their table, refill their coffee mugs, see about pie. She wants to get a conversation going. “You know the Bushes? George and Barbara? You’ve met them? Took them out on that boat of yours, I recall?”
Lem laughs. “Chet thought he was in the charter business,” he says. “Had half the Secret Service thinking that boat would be their death.” He laughs again. “They were going down with their president.”
“It’s a fine boat,” Chester counters.
“It floats,” Mike offers.
“For the time being,” Lem roars. “It floats for the time being.” He slaps his palm against the table, hard, as he says this.
“But you met the president?” Grace continues. “And the first lady?”
“That there’s no lady,” Lem contributes. “That’s Babs.” He’s slapping, still.
“But you met them, right? You know the kind of people they are?”
“I s’pose,” Chester says. “I mean, they’re not having me down to Houston or anything.”
“Fine. So here’s my question. What kind of president d’you think his son would make?” She’s got their three plates stacked on the muscle of her left arm; she’s working the table with a no-longer-wet rag pulled from her apron belt; she’s not cleaning so much as she is moving stuff around. “Junior. Primaries just around the corner. What kind of job you think he’s done down there in Texas?” She’s thinking, okay, this is a good line to pursue, this is something they can get their hands around: local kid, sort of, making good on the national stage. Next-door neighbors in New Hampshire about to cast the first nods in his direction that count for anything more than publicity. She replaces the rag, picks up the coffee pot, and goes to rest the dirty dishes on the counter. Coffee shop’s not so big she can’t have a conversation from the other side of it. “I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this.” She really would, that’s how hungry she is for an exchange of ideas.
“I thought it was Florida,” Mike interjects.
Lem: “No, that’s the other one.”
“The one owns the baseball team.”
Chester, trying to think this through: “He’s got, what, two kids, then?”
“More like a million,” Mike figures. “Remember all those White House Christmas cards? Them all dressed up? Greta Cuthbert’d set ’em out behind her cash register every year like they was close personal friends?”
“Six. Pretty sure.” This is Peter, some guy who paints houses. He’s sitting over by the window. It’s his slow season, it being winter and all. Grace can’t say what accounts for the slowness of her fishermen.
“There was that Vietnamese kid,” Lem contributes. “They adopted this Vietnamese kid, I’m remembering. Didn’t look nothing like ’em.”
“Not like Jack Kennedy,” Chester says, with the reverence New Englanders reserve for their own. “With Jack Kennedy, you knew it was Caroline and John-John and that’s it. They didn’t have to go adopting.”
“Hop Sing Bush.”
Apparently, Kennebunkport or no, the Bushes don’t cut it as New Englanders.
“Dog looked nothing like ’em, either.”
Acky, used to own the hardware store at the corner of Brown and Bartlett, reaches his coffee mug into the air and waves it about. “Coffee,” he says.
“What Vietnamese kid?” Mike wonders. “Since when was there a Vietnamese kid?”
“Millie. A collie, I think.”
“Since she was in all those Christmas cards.”
“There you go, Ack,” Grace says, pouring. She holds the coffee pot out for her other customers to see. “Don’t make me make a special trip,” she warns with what’s left of her good nature. “Ask me now.” Peter the painter holds out his cup, and she moves to fill it.
“No,” Chester corrects. “It was a grandkid. Wadn’t his kid, and it wadn’t no Vietnamese kid, either. Korean, I think. Something like that.”
“Sh’wrote a book. The dog. Remember?”
“There was those miscarriages Jackie had. They had a devil of a time with those miscarriages, ’f’was up to them it wouldn’a been just Caroline and John-John.”
“A spaniel. Some kind of spaniel.”
“What miscarriages?”
“Read a book, why don’tch’ya?”
“No,” Lem insists. “It was Vietnamese. I’m telling you.”
“What the hell is a spaniel, anyway?”
“If a dog can write a book, then I don’t see as I have to go and read it.”
“Since when can you adopt grandchildren?” Mike wants to know. “You can do that?”
Grace, back now to the other side of the coffee shop, has reduced her listening to just one ear, her hoped-for exchange of ideas reduced to the standard foolishness. She’s brought the dishes to the sink and cleaned the rest of the tables and set herself down on her remaining stools and started figuring her lunch checks. One ear of this is about all she can take. She meant to get a conversation going, but it’s like she started a brush fire.
“Hey, Two Stools!” she hears. “Mike here thinks you can adopt grandchildren!”
“Well, then, it must be so,” she sends back. There is no arrogance in her voice, but there’s no effort, either, and there’s no trace of the good nature that had been running thin. “If Mike thinks it, it must be so.” She doesn’t turn around when she says this, keeps figuring her checks. This time of year, she’s got to reach to make ends meet. If the building wasn’t paid up in full, she once told her father, she’d be out on her substantial ass.
“Mexican, maybe,” Mike tries. “For some reason I’m thinking the kid was Mexican.”
Into this foolishness walks Grace’s Harlan—bearded, pale, and looking like he could sell pipe tobacco, or cough drops, maybe even flowers. All he needs is a sweater. (Grace makes a note of this for when he tells his birthday.) He’s caught the gist of the conversation, past few minutes, from the doorjamb to the back stairs. He’s down for a bite to eat and gets this earful from Grace’s chowderheads. “How ’bout she’s American?” he says, when he’s heard enough. “How ’bout her father was the president of these fucking United States, and we’ll just leave it at that.”
The others hadn’t heard Wood come in, and they turn to face him. “Hey, lookie here,” Chester says. “It’s Larry Lobster.”
“Time for his bottom-feeding,” Mike announces.
Grace chuckles at this. It’s a good one, especially for Mike, especially with the way Harlan has to come downstairs to eat. She wonders if Mike put this much thought into it, if he thought of it just now.
“Trask,” Lem says, kicking out a chair. “Just in time for pie.”
They’re glad to see him. They’ve known each other their entire lives, these fishermen, and yet in just a few months they’ve allowed this stranger into their midst to where he’s nearly one of them. He doesn’t fish, but he gets the idea. He gets the rest of it too.
“If Harlan eats, the pie’s for free,” Chester calls over to Two Stools.
“Like hell,” she says, her good nature restored now that Harlan’s around. She likes the sweet mood he brings with him, wants to hold on to it for later, but she hates the idea of free pie. It’s one of her biggest profit margins. That, and coffee. “’He’s not careful, I’ll charge him too.”
“Oh, I pay, Gracie dear,” Wood says, sidling up to the counter, pressing himself against Grace from behind. “I pay dearly.” He kisses the back of her head, sweetly, then he plays absentmindedly with her hair, then he crosses to the other side of the counter and helps himself to what’s left of pie. Blueberry. She’s sold about six pieces, but she cuts them so thin there’s more than half still in the tin. He grabs some forks and walks his bounty back to the table to join his friends.
“What kind?” Lem wants to know.
“Blueberry.”
“Stains my teeth,” Chester says.
“Who’s having?”
“They’re not even yours,” Mike says. “Just take ‘em out and soak ‘em.”
“Ammonia,” Lem declares. “Someone told me ammonia does a good job.”
“Absolutely, on denture stains. This is what we’re talking about. Denture stains.”
“They’re not dentures,” Chester insists. “Mike knows shit. They’re capped, is all. They’re still mine. And it’s just these front four, top and bottom.” He opens wide, in a cheesy smile, to illustrate.
“And who’s paying for all this?” Grace wants to know, meaning the pie party. She’s back at the table. She’s brought plates. She doesn’t want to hear about Chester’s teeth.
“It’s on the house,” Mike says, indicating Wood.
“Since when is Harlan the house?”
“He lives here, don’t he?”
He’s got her there. “So what if he does? Still don’t make him the house.”
Wood puts a five-dollar bill on the table. “Here,” he says. “This makes me the house.”
Grace pushes the money back across the table to Harlan with the tip of her pie knife. “I don’t want your money, Harlan,” she says, and then she waves the knife at the fishermen. “I want theirs.”
Lem laughs at his own joke before he can give it voice, and when he does, it doesn’t come out funny. “Trask can work it off in trade,” he says, hopeful.
“Got any apple?” Chester says, when Grace slides a thin piece of pie in front of him. “This blueberry really does stain.”
“It’s just blueberry today, Chet,” she says. “Sorry.” She really is. They were on sale, the blueberries, flash-frozen, from Oklahoma. She didn’t even know they grew blueberries in Oklahoma, thought it was just wheat fields and maybe corn, but Howie, the wholesaler, swears to it. Says it’s peak growing season down there. “There’s ice cream,” she says, “if you prefer.” She’s off to the painter’s table to see if he wants. Acky never takes pie. Says it clots the arteries. She’s never heard this except from him.
“What kind?”
“Chocolate.” Also on sale: two-for-one.
“Well, that stains too, chocolate.” Chester pouts as he says this. These caps of his have become a big bother, especially around dessert.
“Aw, Chester, quit whining,” Lem says. “Just take your fucking teeth out and put ‘em in your pocket.”
“He’ll have the pie à la mode,” Wood says, and the fishermen howl—Chester, too.
“I suppose you’re payin’ for the mode,” Grace says to Wood, returning to their table. She’s asking and telling, both.
Mike doesn’t know why he’s laughing. “What’s mode?” he wonders, catching his breath. “Ain’t never seen that on the menu.”
This is true, Grace thinks. He ain’t never. She gets her boys served and recaffeinated and returns to her stools to total their bills. They’ve got tabs going, but she’s let them run up pretty high. Money’s tight for everyone this time of year. Harlan, too. She can’t imagine he’d have enough with just his winter paycheck from down at the park if it weren’t for her room and board. He’s got, like, no expenses. She doesn’t have it in her to be on him about work, but she’s thinking a man like that should be working more than just weekends. He should be doing more than just managing. He’s strong and healthy. There must be something. She’s also thinking, you know, he must have some real money somewhere. There must be some resources he can call on, if it gets to that. He’s not the type to go hungry. Just look at him. The man’s put on about thirty pounds since he drifted into town, and most all of it has come from her refrigerator. She doesn’t mind, but it’s something to think about.
“Vanilla’s really a better match for pie,” Lem says. He’s put some thought into this. “Goes with everything.”
“Mmmm,” Mike says, presumably in agreement.
Chester (stained): “Vanilla.”
“D’you hear that, Gracie?” Wood thunders across the restaurant. “The chowderheads seem to think the chocolate dominates the blueberry.”
“That so?” Grace shoots back. She and her one ear are only half-listening. She’s still on her bills, and the mess-ups with her wholesaler, and the way it takes forever for the latest trends to find her, and how Harlan has fitted himself into her world. It’s like there was a place for him, waiting. She’s back and forth and all over. She’s thinking how tomorrow’s Oprah is one of those book club shows (she saw it in the listings), and how she hasn’t read the book, and how she’s got nothing to show for her forty-three years but a small coffee shop with mismatched tables and chairs and more money going out than coming in, how in winter she should probably cut back on one of her Lennys, but then she’s back on Harlan, on what to do with a sixty-six-year-old man who isn’t sure who he wants to be, or where, if he wants to be there with her. She looks over at him, laughing with his new friends, contented, and wonders at her feelings for him.
She feels alone, and yet she’s not alone; she’s somewhere in between. She wonders if what she feels is love, or if it’s just that she loves the attention, the rough of his beard, the salt of his kiss, the way he likes to fall asleep against her breast, watching Nick at Nite. Maybe she just loves the idea of him. It’s not like they’re banging down her bedroom door, the men up here, so maybe she’s confusing Harlan’s banging with something deeper. Maybe it’s just banging. Maybe she’s just a place to park, something to do while he figures what he really wants, and she’s fooling herself into thinking it’s anything more. She’s relaxed around him, herself, but his own uncertainty is beginning to tear at her. And this place—Maine, the coffee shop, the mold on the cheese, the being overweight and alone and forty-three—is beginning to tear at her too. She doesn’t want to grow old, like this, here. She wants a better spot in the geography of cool, to be somewhere, to matter. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her days perched on her two stools talking blueberry stains and George Bush’s adopted Vietnamese grandchildren with her regulars. She doesn’t want to keep reaching. Or, if she has to keep reaching, she wants whatever it is she’s reaching for to stay wherever the hell it is and give her a chance to catch up. She wants Harlan Trask to rise from his chair and cross to the counter and take her in his arms and carry her upstairs and come clean. She wants it to be like that scene in An Officer and a Gentleman, the one where Richard Gere comes into the factory and collects Debra Winger into his arms and fireman-carries her to a happy ending, and everyone in the coffee shop will just stand and applaud and surge with good feelings. She wants to look like Debra Winger. From the back. From the front, she wants to look like that actress from The English Patient, the one who has sex in the bathtub with Ralph Fiennes and then dies in the cave. Sometimes she thinks she’d even take dying in a cave if it came with having sex in the bathtub with Ralph Fiennes. It seems to Grace as good a way to go as any.
“Here,” Pet says, emerging from the front hall closet, handing Pimletz a pair of Wood’s sheepskin mittens and his flap-eared woolen hat. “It’s cold.”
“I’m okay,” he says, pulling on his own parka. “Shouldn’t be too bad.” He doesn’t like the idea of wearing other people’s hats. He especially doesn’t like the idea of wearing dead people’s hats. Slippers, he doesn’t mind; he could even see his way into a coat; but there’s something about a dead guy’s hat leaves him queasy. He opens the door and steps one foot across the threshold. “See,” he says. “A regular day at the beach.”
In truth, it is cold—about six degrees when they got up this morning—and there’s a dusting of snow to cover the few fresh inches they had the day before yesterday, and neither one of them is dressed for it. Pimletz is determined to make like it doesn’t matter, and what does Pet know about winter? She’s a California girl. She looked outside and announced that a walk would be a good idea. Through the frosted panes of the kitchen window, the woods seemed like something out of a storybook, and she thought she could use a good story. She ached to be out in the swallowed-up silence of the fresh snow. Anyway, it’s been a while since anyone picked up the mail in the box at the end of the road, and she thought they could maybe make a special trip out of it.
“Cold enough for you?” Pimletz says. It’s a stupid thing to say, but he’s got nothing else.
“Maybe just a short walk,” Pet suggests, stepping all the way out the door. “To the mailbox and back.” Right away, her ache shifts to wanting to be back inside. This looked good, all this softsilent snow, but the coldness cuts through her. All she’s got on, really, is a T-shirt and a sweater and a fleece pullover. She could use a couple more layers, a pair of proper boots, maybe some thermals. The knit hat and scarf she pulled from the top shelf in the closet seem mostly for show; she wonders if maybe they’re Anita’s or one of their weekend guests’. Pet certainly doesn’t remember buying them; there are enough holes in the pattern to test the theories of insulation through negative space; she wraps the scarf around her neck three or four times, like she’s winding a yo-yo, and she leaves enough play in the wrap to slip it up around her mouth and nose and cheeks, and then she tucks what’s left of the scarf’s loose end under its middle. Her ears she can just forget about. No way is this hat keeping her warm.
“Least there’s no wind,” Pimletz says. Again, it’s all he’s got.
“Like at this temperature, it really fucking matters.”
“Move around,” he suggests, hopping up and down as they start to walk so that he gives the appearance of being in a sack race. “Get the circulation going. Warm you up in no time.” His breath, when it leaves, turns to ice against his upper lip.
Pet is not about to hop up and down the length of the drive, a half-mile or so, to the mailbox and back. She’d rather get frostbite, or hypothermia, or whatever people get when they’re too long in the too cold. She doesn’t want to look ridiculous, even though she realizes her wrapped-around scarf is no help in this regard; the hopping business would just increase her ridiculousness exponentially. She’d rather lose a toe and look ridiculous in the privacy of her own home. “Let’s just get this over with,” she says.
“You make it sound like it was my idea.”
“Sorry,” she says, “but this wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“I can run up ahead? Save you the round trip?”
She’s too cold to answer.
“You can start back without me.” He doesn’t wait for a response. He darts ahead, slipsliding over the mostly packed snow. Last night’s dusting has barely covered the packed, iced-over driveway leading out to the road. It looks good on the trees, but it doesn’t offer any traction, and with his seventh or eighth step, he is on his back, his legs tripped out from underneath like a drunk on a log. The snow collects him with a resolute crunch. “Shit,” he says, fallen, but he scrambles to his feet and shakes off the loose snow and continues to the road. He doesn’t look back to see if Pet noticed his falling, but when he’s down in the snow and scrambling it occurs to him that the thing to do is pretend nothing happened. The thing to do is press on.
He wills himself to not look back. It reminds him of a game he used to play on himself, as a kid, when he left the apartment for school each day. They lived in a Storrow Drive high-rise, same place his mother lives now, and she would walk with him through the meandering streets of Beacon Hill on down to the Common, after which it was just a straight shot across the park to his school. He always tried just to leave his mother there without looking back or waving or checking to see if she was still watching, but he could never make it all the way without turning over his shoulder. She was always still there, matching his gaze, waiting for him to disappear inside the safety of the school. He used to hate that he had to look, but he couldn’t help himself. If he’d been thinking of something else, he would have been fine, but he laid out this test like it was important. Or maybe it was a test for his mother, to see if she loved him enough to keep her watch, or maybe to pinpoint the day when she stopped loving him enough to keep her watch. He tries now to remember the day he made it across for the first time without looking back, because eventually, of course, he started walking to school on his own, except now he figures he must’ve gotten to that point by degrees because he can’t recall that first day. He wonders if there was triumph in it, for him, or if mostly it was tinged with sadness, or if maybe he didn’t notice it at all. Maybe it was just a day, like the one before.
Today, though, he makes it. It bugs the shit out of him, not to look back to see if Pet is watching, but he makes it, and he wonders if this signals a kind of growth or just that he’s finally learned a measure of control. There is no triumph in his reaching the mailbox without turning around. There’s no sadness. It just is.
Terence Wood’s mail is bundled and waiting. Up here, rural route deliveries are only twice a week, and the mail comes bundled in thick rubber bands. (If the locals need their mail on a daily basis, they can pick it up at the post office.) Pimletz collects the half-dozen bundles, and he can see without sorting that it’s mostly circulars, some bills, magazines. In the whole pile, there are only a few pieces of real correspondence. He doesn’t see the point in collecting a dead man’s mail, especially when the temperatures are in the single digits and the mail is mostly circulars, but this is what Pet wanted. He wonders what she’ll do with it.
He turns back with the few bundles cradled in his arms, and he notices Pet halfway down the drive, about where he left her, only she seems to be doing more than just standing still, or less. She seems to be not moving at all, frozen, and as he quickens his pace he notices she’s stuck with one arm up in the air and the other at her hip. This strikes him as the kind of strange he might need to do something about. “Pet,” he calls out, racing back. “Pet.”
She makes a noise, but Pimletz can’t make it out.
“Pet,” he says again.
She makes the same noise, and Pimletz strains to hear it. He’s just a few yards away, and then he’s on her, and then she says it again. Her lips, far as he can tell, are not moving behind the wrapped-around scarf. What he can’t tell is she’s smiling.
“Oil can,” she squeaks, in her impression of a tinny voice. She’s gone from being too cold to breathe, to just being cold, to thinking it’s really not that bad out, once you get used to it. She’s out here, she’s cold, she might as well have some fun. She holds her pose like a statue. “Oil can.” It comes out sounding like oyolkin, oyolkin.
“What?” Pimletz says. He’s not catching on.
“Oil can,” she squeaks again. Then, in a stage whisper: “You’re supposed to get me an oil can and lube up my joints and get me moving again. Tell me you’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz.”
Pimletz, wanting to please, pantomimes the getting of an oil can and the lubing up of joints, which allows Pet to pantomime the gift of movement after a rust or a thaw. “Better?” he says, playing along.
“Better.” Pet goes into some elaborate stretching, and then she laughs, and then she pushes Pimletz playfully in the chest with both hands—a you-don’t-say! gesture that catches him off guard and knocks him back down to the snow. He clutches the bundles of mail as he falls, doesn’t think to break his own. “You just can’t seem to keep your feet,” she says. “You’re like the scarecrow.” She laughs again, and races in a zig-zag toward the cabin.
Pimletz scrambles back up and goes to catch her. He has to think about it, though. He has to think if this is what he’s supposed to do. He’s not used to such playfulness. He’s not used to getting other people’s jokes—not on just the first or second pass, anyway. He’s thinking, at last, a Hollywood reference he can understand. The Wizard of Oz he knows. He’s also thinking he’s got no playfulness of his own to contribute to the occasion.
Petra Wood is not thinking at all. She’s no longer cold. She’s beyond cold. She’s to where the temperature is accepted. There are other things. She’s lost in what she’s doing and in what she’s lost. She did this, once, romped in the snow with Wood. It was warmer, but they were out here on these same grounds, making snow angels, laughing, ducking behind trees, throwing snowballs, running around like they were the only two people on the planet. She wants to reclaim that moment, to taste it again and measure how it is now against how she remembers it. She wants to put her life on rewind and see how it looks on second viewing.
“Norman,” Terence Wood writes into the ether. “There are some things I need to tell you.”
He is hunched, uncomfortably, over one of the user terminals in the electronic room of the Bar Harbor Public Library, just a few beats after having gotten over the fact that there even is such a place. The library he knew about, but the electronic room is a revelation. He wandered in, thinking he might thumb through some magazines, maybe read the flap copy on some of the new celebrity autobiographies, check out the indexes, see if he’s mentioned, and he stumbled on all these Packard Bells. Without even thinking about it, he logged on to one and started writing. It was something to do, a place to put some of the things he’s been thinking, and it was almost as if it happened without him. Once he got going, he couldn’t stop; it was like he was being pulled under by the riptide of what’s happened. He didn’t think it through to where it was about saving what he writes, or printing it out, or sending it out to be read. He didn’t think it through to where it was about thinking it through. All he wanted was to not be swallowed up by it. All he wanted is for what he had to say to find its way out of his head and down through his fingers and out into the world. He continues:
There’s no easy place to begin, except to say I’m here. Still. Yup. How the fuck about that? Okay, so that’s a start, right? I’m still here. Boom. Big opening scene. Roll opening credits, right?
But really, Norman, it just kicks the shit out of me I haven’t been able to reach out to you until now to tell you, you know, what I’ve been doing, what’s behind what I’ve been doing. I’m not even sure I know myself, except to say it might surprise you. Surprised the shit out of me, that’s for fucking sure. Still does. Every day. Surprises the shit right out one end and back in the other. Surprise, surprise.
It just hit me, is all, how it started. That night, in the rain, on that road. Boom. Exit, stage left. Remember that cartoon we used to sometimes watch when you were a kid? The one with the tiger? One of those Hanna-Barbera pieces of shit. I think it was a tiger. Maybe a lion. Some big cat. “Exit, stage left.” What the hell was that tiger’s name? Some great character actor did the voice. Guy I worked with once. Why am I not thinking of this asshole’s name?
Bah. Here’s a better question. Who cares? Better to talk about my presumed death, right? About what the hell was going on with me. Is.About what the hell IS going on with me. This is why we’re here. Okay, so what can I tell you? It just seemed the thing to do, to check out like that, because Jesus, things were just shit. I mean, you know. You know the kind of shit I was in, the kinds of pictures I was doing, the people I had around me. There was all that shit going on with Pet. And there was your mother, and that asshole Swede, and that whole thing.
I was miserable. I thought I’d never be happy again, and I probably wouldn’t have been, that’s the truth. I probably would have developed some expensive drug habit, or started drinking again, or found some new way back to one of those fucking clinics, but not before I made such a public ass of myself that I became a running joke on Letterman, or woke up in a pile of my own piss or vomit, or was arrested at some airport for carrying a gun through the security gate, or something pathetically ridiculous. Me and Robert Downey Jr., right? Me and my cry for help. And then, when Betty Ford or whoever the fuck it’d be decided I was okay to check out, I’d have been on the cover of People or the National Enquirer, one of those magazines, telling how it was just a miracle that I made it through, thanks to all these good people at the clinic, and to my fans, and to the love of my family, or some fucking shit like that. I’d have to hire a publicist to smooth out my image. Or maybe I would have found religion. Now that’s a sorry fucking thought: me and organized religion getting along. But that’s what I would’ve become, the poster boy for hopeless desperation, that’s where I was headed. I was so out of the fucking loop, my agent would have killed for me to be a running joke on Letterman.
Pathetic, right? Let me tell you, I was for shit. When was the last time we spoke before that night? I can’t even remember. I was just plugged out. You were off at school. We left messages for each other, but we hardly spoke. I was hooked up with some piece from one of those reality shows on MTV. She was closer to your age than mine. (Shit, she was probably younger than you, now that I think of it!) So there was all that, and Pet was out of her fucking head about the divorce. She hired these fuckwad lawyers who barricaded me from the house. Did I ever tell you that? I don’t think so, but they actually had her change the locks, can you believe it? They had her freaked. It was over, but it wasn’t over, and it was still a let’s-leave-the-door-open kind of thing, but there were all these suits around telling her to grab what she could before I pissed it all away. There was no prenup, I didn’t have the balls to ask for a prenup, and they had her thinking she should clean me out. On her own, she was thinking, you know, maybe we could work things out, get back together, find a way to patch. I don’t think she knew about the MTV thing, I hoped not, but they’re on the phone filling her head with how she needs to make a complete financial disconnect, how I’m no longer a bankable property. These are actually quotes. A complete financial disconnect. No longer a bankable property. I mean, shit. And I look at the way she’s carrying on now, I’ve seen the interviews she’s given in some of the papers, the way she’s playing at the grieving widow thing. She was on Good Morning, America, couple weeks after that night talking about how she wanted people to remember me. Did you see that? Jesus.
So it wasn’t the money. You can understand that, right? I’ve got no fucking idea myself, what it was truly about, but I don’t want you thinking this was about the money. (I certainly don’t want Pet thinking this was about money; I don’t want her thinking anything; far as she should be thinking, I’m just gone.) So, no, it wasn’t money. I’ve had no money before. I’ve got no money now. You’d shit to see the way I’m living since that night. So it wasn’t that.
Maybe it was the principle. Maybe I was just tired and needed a long fucking rest. Maybe it was that she let these assholes in to submarine whatever we had left, that she didn’t trust it enough to find out, that she didn’t trust me to take care of her if it didn’t. Maybe it was that even these fuckwad Hollywood lawyers thought my career was for shit. Forty years, I’d been making pictures, and I was no longer a bankable property. They weren’t even born when I started making pictures. Pet wasn’t even born. What the fuck did they know? They had her poisoned against me, that’s for fucking sure.
Then there was this other picture I was signed to do next, this futuristic piece of crap down in New Zealand. We were supposed to begin production in a couple weeks, that was a whole other thing I had weighing down on me. They had me fitted for a codpiece, can you believe it? Me in a codpiece? And there was that book I was supposed to be writing. Did that ever make it back to you? That I was writing a book? Jesus. I mean, I didn’t even read the shit my partners had me optioning, back when I had my production company, remember? S.O.S. Shit on a stick. People were always asking if it stood for anything, our production company, or if it was just another actor’s inflated ego cry to be taken seriously. S.O.S. That was before you, by a little bit. We didn’t produce a fucking thing. I just read the coverage. Once or twice a week, I’d go in and see what everyone was reading on my behalf. Like I said, I didn’t read. My reviews, maybe, sometimes, and scripts when they were a done deal, but that’s it.
And here comes one of my asshole agents, talking me into writing a book. Said it wasn’t for the few million the publisher was willing to pay, but for what the book would do for me when it came out. Said it was just like picking out exactly the right tie to complement a great new suit. This was the analogy he used, and I was in such a fucked-up zone, I bought into it. Plus, I needed the money. Man, I always needed the money back then. The idea was the book would get people thinking about the old Terence Wood again, people in the business, but the truth was, people in the business were still thinking about Terence Wood, it’s just that they weren’t thinking much. Hah! What a fucking joke . . .
Wood runs out of time before he runs out of things to write. One of the librarians comes by and tells him they’re closing up, he should think about finishing. He doesn’t know what’s happened to the time. It was light outside, still, when he came in; now it must be like nine or ten; probably the library closes at like nine or ten; probably he should do something with what he’s written. He’s not thinking clearly, but he’s moving quickly, and he’s taking what he can manage of his thoughts with him. To lose it all now would invalidate the effort he put into it. It would be as if he hadn’t even bothered, as if whatever discoveries he’s made in the writing would once again be unclaimed.
But what can he do with it? He can’t print it out—there’re pages and pages of rambling stuff. There’s no time. Plus, he’s not even sure there’s a printer. There’s no way to save what he’s written on a public terminal, and he doesn’t have a disc or any other place to store it. So, in confusion, he decides to send it to himself. To who he used to be. It’s something, at least. Some place. He can’t just zap all this effort and have it disappear; he’s been conditioned to keep what he writes in case he ever needs it, since boarding school, and already he’s begun to look on these few pages as a kind of lifeline to what he’s left behind. It doesn’t occur to him he could just write them again. Shouldn’t be too hard to call these same thoughts to mind, especially now that he’s had them. They’re his, after all. But he goes the other way and, on an impulse, directs the computer to send it to his old e-mail address. He sees this little mailbox icon in the corner of his screen, is where he gets the impulse, figures there must be some way to send this shit back out there. Someplace else. Why the fuck not, he’s thinking. At least it’s a productive, forward-looking decision. If he ever needs it, there it will be, accessible, assuming his account is still valid. He let it lapse once before for a stretch of about a year, and the Prodigy people didn’t shut him off. He’s thinking, they’re so desperate for customers they’ll even count a dead guy among their ranks, and, anyway, it just gets billed direct to his credit card. If Wood knows Pet and her fuckwad lawyers, those accounts are still open. And if they’re not? Well, at least he tried. At least he didn’t submit to the electronic equivalent of balling up a stack of typewritten pages and tossing them in the trash. At least he meant to do something with it.
He decides on this course, but then he can’t remember his code. It’s been so long, his e-mail address has gone the way of old PIN codes and passwords. It all strikes him like some ancient cryptography. He never had any trouble with safe deposit keys back when he was still around, back when that was all he needed to keep track of, but these fucking passwords were always a bitch. Now that he’s been so long away from his own computer, from his long distance carrier, from his automated teller machine, the codes have faded from memory. Something to do with the movie he was making, maybe, back when he first signed on. He runs through his few parts, last four or five years, but nothing strikes him. Then he runs through his important dates—birthdays, anniversaries—but still comes up blank. Then he thinks maybe he just used his name, maybe the fact that he was using a stagnant provider like Prodigy would be protection enough from the nuts and fruitcakes out trolling the Internet. Nobody would find him there. Nobody uses Prodigy anymore.
But it wasn’t just “Wood,” straight out. It wasn’t “Terence” or “Terry” or any predictable rendering of same. No, he realizes now, it was Norman’s own corrosive nickname—“Woodman”—hinting, as it did, at the suspect superpowers that attach to celebrity, and confirming, as it now does, those suspicions.
Yes. Woodman@prodigy.com. He sends what he’s written and he’s gone. And back. In no time.
This afternoon at the Stop ’n’ Shop, Anita bought Oreos on sale, three-for-one. She bought them for the bargain, but also for the way they got her thinking about Wood. It doesn’t take much these days to get her thinking about Wood, and today it was just cookies.
There she was, wheeling up and down the super-wide aisles with the super-wide carts, when the display grabbed her attention and took her back to the life she used to have. And here she is, now, at her own kitchen table, dead solid center in the life that has claimed her; she’s tidying up after dinner, emptying the contents of one bag into one of the large canning jars she and Nils use for keeping cookies, brushing the left-behind crumbs from the table into a saucer of milk she’s poured for dunking.
Nils didn’t understand. Of course, he wouldn’t. He joined her in the kitchen to unpack the groceries and remarked at the Oreos. “Tell me, they were giving these away?” he asked, in that way of his. He also enjoys a creme-centered sandwich cookie, but he enjoys them generically and only from time to time. Three bags at once of the name brand needed some explaining, but Anita couldn’t find the words to tell how her ex-husband used to stack his Oreos into a tiny tower and flick them, from the top, into a saucer of milk on the table below. The grand finale to Wood’s routine was when he reached the Oreo at the bottom of the tower and allowed himself the small cheat of putting the saucer on a chair tucked part-way beneath the table and shot the cookie across the messed table top like a hockey puck. Altogether, it was the target practice of a small child, and it never lost its appeal. The milk would splatter all over the place—on his shirt, on the floor, on the chair legs. Sometimes, Anita would wake up the next morning, and there’d be little speckles of cookied milk in corners of the kitchen unlikely enough to suggest that perhaps her husband wasn’t a very good shot. But for some reason, Anita never minded cleaning up after one of Wood’s midnight snacks. There was a maid (a tiny girl named Resa, from Ecuador), but Anita couldn’t leave this chore for her. Always, on those mornings, crawling on the kitchen floor with a wet rag, looking for the previous night’s splatter, she got to thinking how her husband wasn’t like other husbands, how she relished his differences. She couldn’t think how to tell Nils, her new husband, who doesn’t own any differences except, of course, in comparison to her ex-husband, how she still misses the man to whom she was once married, the man with whom she produced her only child. They’d been divorced going on ten years, she and Wood, he’s been gone another few months, and yet she can’t walk past a display of on-sale Oreos at the Stop ’n’ Shop without getting all wistful.
She builds her own Oreo tower, then picks them off one at a time and dunks each cookie between the pinched fingers of a more refined adulthood. The Oreos never leave her hand, so that when each cookie is nearly soaked through, there’s still a small section of solid crust between her wet fingers. She swallows them whole and marvels at the contrast between hard and soft, then and now.
Nils is just in the next room watching a tape of today’s Jeopardy!, which goes on too early for him to catch at its original time. Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven, for some reason, can’t bear the thought of flicking the stacked Oreos across the table to a waiting saucer of milk and making such an elaborate mess and having to explain to her new husband what she’s doing. Actually, the thought alone has a nostalgic appeal; what she can’t bear is the thought of being found out after acting on it.
Anyway, she convinces herself, like this is better. Like this is basically the same thing, she thinks, dunking, listening to her new husband bark out his Jeopardy! answers from the next room. Like this makes more sense.
It’s late for Pimletz to be working. Usually, he puts in his couple hours of not writing around the middle of the day. That’s the routine. Sleep late, read the paper, flip around some of the morning talk shows, sit down at the computer, maybe take a walk, run into town to do his shopping, maybe pick up a video to watch that evening, turn in after the local news. Early mornings, late afternoons, evenings, he doesn’t even bother trying to work, only now that Pet’s on the scene, his habits are up for grabs. She’s got him romping around in the snow, or trying on Wood’s old clothes, or taking wine and cheese in front of a fire she’s had him build and jump-start with a Duraflame brick. (The fires, not incidentally, have forced him to move his writing station from Wood’s great stone hearth to the breakfast nook.)
His days have gone from a string of empty rituals to one of those phony montage sequences in bad television movies. He still accomplishes little, in terms of Wood’s book, but he’s frayed by the changes to his schedule. Pet just keeps him going and going, and she mixes in a generous helping of spontaneous fondling and grinding. Well, for Pimletz it’s spontaneous; it just touches down around him, from nowhere; to Pet, it must be calculated and precisely what she has in mind, but to Pimletz it’s a gift. She’s way into grinding, this Pet, says it gets her off bigger and quicker than the real deal. He’s never heard this, Pimletz, but she likes it when he goes at her through his jeans, hard, says the feel of denim against her trimmed pussy sends her completely overfucking-board. That’s her word for it. It’s wetifying; that’s another one. She’s got all these different words for the things they do to each other, for how they make her feel. When she cleans him off after he comes, it’s a spit-shine. When she pulls him and his jeans down atop her soft naked body, it’s another bushwacking.
What the fuck does he care? It’s actually easier on him, not to have to worry about staying hard after his inevitably premature ejaculation or spilling himself all over the damn place. Friction is friction, he thinks, grinding, and besides, this Pet’s wired in such a way that he can pump at her pubic bone with a thimble and get her off. So it works out. Let her call it what she wants.
She’s just thrown him off his schedule, is all. That, and chased him from his cozy fireplace. This last sets him back. He liked the way he had things all set up in there, the way the occasional tap of his fingers against the keyboard bounced off the cold, clammy stone walls like a caved echo. It’s not like he got any work done before Pet arrived, but at least he worked at his not working. Now he has to work at his not working when she’s asleep, and he has to do it in the kitchen. He shuffles in his Wood-stockinged feet to the breakfast nook and switches on Wood’s computer. He’s got his own laptop with him, but the great man left behind this monster flat screen with killer resolution; usually what happens is Pimletz just winds up online anyway, before too long. Wood’s attorney left behind his client’s old Prodigy password, allowing Pimletz to roam cyberspace on the estate’s dime. He does this usually on the fooling-himself premise that he needs to look something up on one of the filmography pages he’s found, or to check the bios on some of Wood’s dead costars, or to make sure he’s got his chronology straight.
Once he’s online, he’s all over the place—not writing, but making a show of it. He’s got his nook lit by a lone floor lamp, the rest of the cabin is dark, and as he taps at his keys the color of the light changes with what he’s doing. The nook is tinted by reds and greens and yellows, depending. There, on the Prodigy menu, the place goes all rainbow-y on him. Then he looks down and sees his fingernails are blue, the white of his T-shirt lit up like a black-light poster. He doesn’t notice the effect during the day with the abundant sunlight, but here at night, with only a sixty-watt bulb, the effect is enormous.
The colors on some of these screens leave the small nook area looking like it’s across the street from an all-night diner with a flashing neon sign. But then he thinks it’s more subtle than that. It’s more like watching the people across the courtyard in his mother’s apartment complex, watching them watch television. This is what he used to do as a kid; he used to try to figure out what channel the people across the courtyard were watching from the way the light patterns changed in their otherwise dark apartment. They were always watching something, every night, and always with the lights off. He’d look through his binoculars and guess what was on from the tinted glow on their faces. Then he’d lower the binoculars and cross to the set in his living room and try to find the same channel; the idea was to get the light changes in time with theirs. This was back before cable and all those damn channels that came with it, so it never took Pimletz very long to achieve synchronicity, but he wonders how long he’d have to work through today’s one hundred twelve-channel capability to reach the same end. Plus, you know, what if they had a dish? Then he’d be at it all night.
He switches off the floor lamp to heighten the effect, and what he gets back is still more of the same. It’s more intense, but essentially the same. There are a dozen sites he can check out before having to start making excuses to himself for not returning to his manuscript, and he means to hit every one of them. There’s a celebrity chat room thing going on with that actress from the X-Files, that alien detective show on Fox, and it’s set for ten o’clock. Pimletz doesn’t watch the show, but the actress is pretty hot, and he’s thinking he might check it out. Soon he’s on to the ESPN sports ticker service to catch the box score to this afternoon’s Celtic game. They’re in Vancouver, of all places, and he’s thinking, Vancouver? It’s the Bruins should be in Vancouver, not the Celtics. Next, he bounces on to a gardening site because he’s been thinking of getting a garden going out back, long as he’s here. He’s checking out the projected temperatures for early spring to see about setting up an appropriate planting rotation, when he starts to hear some strange chime noises coming from the speakers bracketing the screen. He’s never heard these noises before, but he gets that they’re coming together in a kind of tune. It’s a tune he recognizes, but can’t place. Some sixties shit. Hendrix, maybe. The computer chime reduces the song to a kind of muzak, but it’s clear: “Purple Haze.”
Pimletz’s first thought is maybe the music has something to do with the X-Files promotion, maybe it’s a way to get people to visit the site, but then he’s thinking this doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t know much about computers or Internet technology, but he knows the song’s got nothing to do with X-Files. Must be it’s a signal for him, an e-mail alert, but he’s never gotten an e-mail on this machine before. Usually, he gets his email back in the newsroom; he’s got to link up to the Record-Transcript on the laptop he brought up with him, and, in those cases, he is interrupted by what was once a human voice telling him, “You’ve got mail.” He’s never heard these musical chimes, and yet it makes sense to him that they’re a kind of mail call. He’s seen that at other people’s desks, but then, in coming to this realization, he only gets more confused. He can’t think who has his address. He doesn’t know it himself. The lawyer, maybe. Must be he’s got it written down somewhere, or maybe it’s Anita, the second Mrs. Wood, trying to reach out to the third. Could be anyone. Probably it’s just a solicitation from the Prodigy people, trying to sell the user on some new service or pricing scheme. Nevertheless, he wonders at the etiquette on intercepting e-mail, figures it’s not the same as opening a misdirected bank statement. Anyway, it’s not like he’s trespassing or anything, or poaching on someone else’s equipment; he’s here on full authority. He’ll just say he had no idea.
And so, clueless, Pimletz closes the gardening page window, and the ESPN sports ticker window, and the celebrity chat window, and retraces his steps to the Prodigy menu. He clicks on the tiny mailbox picture that presumably houses his unsolicited message. Ah. There. Yes, indeed, he’s got mail, and, in the beat it takes for it to appear on his screen, he rubs at his legs in excitement.
It takes him ten minutes to read the document. He’s scrolling down the screen as fast as the Page Down arrow can take him, and when he reaches bottom, he shoots right back to the top to read it again. It’s more than anything he could have imagined. He reads it a third time just to make sure he’s got all of it, and then he presses the commands to print it out, and to save it, and generally just to keep it at hand.
Next, he walks to the phone on the kitchen wall and dials Hamlin’s number at home. He’s dialed it only once before (they don’t exactly have the kind of friendship that transcends the workplace), but Pimletz has got the same prefix and the rest of it is the kind of number even he can easily remember: 1717.
Hamlin’s out pursuing truth, justice, and the American way, his answering machine tells, but Pimletz is welcome to wait for the beep and leave a message of any length, after which Hamlin may or may not get back to him, depending on whether or not he gives a shit.
“Hey, asshole,” Pimletz says at the beep. “It’s me. Axel. You’ve outdone yourself.”