Dressing Up for the Carnival (10 page)

 

 

We can’t help being proud of our men and women. They work hard to understand the topography of the real. It’s a heartbreaking struggle, yet somehow they carry on—predicting, measuring, analyzing, recording, looking over their shoulders at the presence of their accumulated labor, cocking an ear to the sounds of their alarm clocks going off and calling them to temperature-controlled rooms and the dings and dongs of their word processors, the shrill bells of approval or disapproval, the creaks of their bodies as the years pile up, and the never-ending quarrel with their smothered, creaturely, solitary selves. Limitations—always they’re crowded up against limitations. Sometimes our men and women give way to old nightmares or denial or the delusion that living in the world is effortless and full of ease. Like everyone else, they’re spooked by old injuries, and that swift plummeting fall toward what they believe must be the future. Nevertheless they continue to launch their various theories, theories so fragile, speculative, and foolish, so unanchored by proofs and possibilities, and so distorted by their own yearnings, that their professional reputations are put at risk, their whole lives, you might say. Occasionally, not often, they are called upon to commit an act of extraordinary courage.

Which is why we stand by our men and women. In the end they may do nothing. In the meantime, they do what they can.

KEYS

Biff Monkhouse, the man who brought bebop to Europe, collapsed and died last week in the lobby of the George V Hotel in Paris. His was a life full of success and failure, full of love and the absence of love. The famous “teddy boy” attire he affected was a kind of self-advertisement saying: I am outside of time and nationality, beyond gender and class.

No wallet or passport was found on his person.

No coins, snapshots, receipts, letters, or lists were found on his person.

No spectacles, prescriptions, pills, phone numbers, credit cards were found on his person.

No rings, wristwatches, chains, tattoos, or distinguishing scars were found on his person.

No alcohol, caffeine, heroin, crack, or HIV-positive cells were found in his bloodstream.

No odor attached to his body.

His hair had been recently cut. His nails were pared, his shoes only lightly scuffed. His right hand was closed in a tight fist.

An ambulance attendant pried open Biff Monkhouse’s fist half an hour after the collapse and found there, warm and somewhat oily, a plain steel key ring holding nine keys of various shapes and sizes.

Dr. Marianne Moriarty of Agassiz University read the Biff Monkhouse news item (Reuters) and found it not at all surprising. She’s evolved her own complex theory about keys, why people cling to them, what they represent. Every time you turn a key in a lock you make a new beginning—that’s one of her beliefs. Keys are useful, portable, and highly metaphorical, suggesting as they do the two postures we most often find ourselves in—for either we are locked in . . . or locked out. In her 1987 doctoral thesis she reported the startling fact that North Americans carry, on average, 5.3 keys. (Those who are prudent have copies hidden away, occasionally in places they no longer remember.) She herself carries twelve keys—condo, office, mailbox, garage, jewelry box, and the like, also a hotel key (Hawaii) she can’t bear to send back. Using an approved statistical sample, she’s worked out the correlation between the number of keys carried and the educational or economic or age level of the key carrier. Her mother Elsie, for instance, a sixty-six-year-old housewife in the small town of Grindley, Saskatchewan, carries only three keys—back door, front door, safe-deposit box, period—while Marianne’s lover, Malcolm Loring, professor emeritus of the Sociology Department, a married man with a private income, carries sixteen keys, one of which unlocks the door of a boathouse that burned down two years ago.

Arson was suspected, but never proven. Sixteen-year-old Christopher MacFarlane, skinny, ponytailed, bad skin, a gaping, shredded hole in the left knee of his blue jeans, and a single unattached, unidentified key in his back pocket, happened to be in the vicinity at the time of the fire. He was questioned, but later released after a somewhat rougher-than-usual body search. The young police sergeant eyed him closely and said, “We’d like you to tell us, sonny, exactly what this key is you’ve got in your pocket.” “I don’t know,” the boy replied.

He had found the little key in the grass behind the marina. He’d been lying there flat on his belly, running the palm of his hand back and forth across the dry, colorless, shaven blades, feeling the unbreatheable heat and thinking about sex—the fundamental circularity of sexual awakening, first longing, then intention and discharge, then satisfaction, and finally quiescence. What was the use of it, he wondered, this wasteful closed rhythm that presented itself again and again like an old fable that wheezes out its endless repetition. It wore away at him. He kept hoping to drive it away, but a kind of anxiety was forever regrowing around his heart, and he felt he would never be free.

And then he saw something burning in the grass near his head, a coin or a bottle cap. But no—when he reached out he found it was a key. It lay lightly in his hand, small and almost weightless, rounded at its head and punched with a ridged hole. The other end—the business end, as some people call it—was dull-toothed, cheaply made, stamped out rather than cut; possibly it was a bicycle key or the key to a locker. Or else—and he pushed himself up on one elbow, peering at it closely, turning it over in his hand—or else it was the key to money or mystery or fame or passion. He slid the little key into his back pocket, where it remained for several weeks, long enough for its silhouette to leave an imprint on the faded denim material, a thready raised patch of white shading off into blue.

The key was later discovered in the dryer of the Harbor Heights Laundromat by one of its regular clients, Cheryl Spence, thirty-four, who lives on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise across the street. It was a Saturday morning. She dumped in her blouses, her full cotton skirts and sundresses, her socks and underwear, her pillowcase and duvet cover. She turns all these items inside out when she launders them, giving them a hard shake as her mother had done, as her grandmother once did, and then she examines the pockets for stray tissues and paper clips. Buttons are buttoned and zippers zipped. She checks the temperature setting, measures the detergent in the little Styrofoam cup provided by the management.

Oh, how orderly and careful I am, she says to herself, how
good
! In her change purse there are plenty of quarters to feed the machines, little silvery stacks of them lying on their sides, rubbing solidly together. If other people doing their laundry on a Saturday morning run short of change, Cheryl can always help them out. Whenever this happens she reflects on what a kind, generous, and altruistic person she is, and what a pity there aren’t more good-hearted people in the world like herself. She thinks this, but doesn’t say it. As a very young child, not more than six or seven years of age, she understood that she was scheduled to have a doubled existence—an open life in which her actions were plainly visible, and a hidden life where thought and intention squatted darkly. This powerful separation seems wholly natural to her, not a thing to rage against or even to question. The real world, of course, is in her own head, which she sometimes thinks of as a shut room provisioned with declaration and clarity, everything else being a form of theater.

The little key she found at the Harbor Heights Laundromat was bent from being tossed about in the dryer’s drum. Some of its particularity had been rubbed away by heat and friction. She straightened it as best she could between her fingers, dropped it into her purse, and carried it home. Who knows when she might be confronted by a lock she can’t open?

For several months it sat, or rather lay, in a kitchen drawer, in a cracked teacup to be precise, along with a single hairpin, a handful of thumbtacks, a stub of a candle, half an eraser, a blackened French coin, a book of matches from the Infomatic Center, a rubber band or two, and a few paper clips. Odds and ends. Flotsam and jetsam.

In the evenings, tired out from a day at the accounts office, she likes to read long romantic novels and listen to music on her CD player. One night—it was in the middle of January, in the middle of an ice storm—she sat reading a book called
The Sands of Desire
and listening to a concert of soft rock when she felt herself seized by an impulse to purify her life. The way her thighs broadened out as she sat in her chair, the printed words slipping out of focus, the notes of music—their excess and persistence crowded up against her, depriving her for a frightening moment of oxygen. She opened a window and let the icy air come into her apartment, but it was not enough. She grasped a small corduroy cushion and hurled it out the window, observing with satisfaction the way it spun around in the dark air as it descended, a soft little satellite of foam and fabric. Next she threw into the driving phosphorescence a compact disc she had bought on sale only one week earlier, a medley of country ballads, wailing, weak, and jerky with tears. In a kitchen cupboard she found a family-sized package of Cheese Twists, then a brown-edged head of lettuce in the refrigerator—out they went, one after the other, sailing off the tips of her fingers. And finally, in a gesture that was a kind of suicide or ritual cleansing, she didn’t know which, she emptied out the cracked china cup with its miserable, broken, mismatched contents, its unsorted detritus of economy and mystery. It seemed to her she could hear the separate items rattling down through the frozen tree branches and landing like a shower of meteorites on the rooftops of the cars parked below—the paper clips, the thumbtacks, the little bent key. Ping. Tut. Tsk, Tick. Gone.

This same Cheryl Spence has visited the Pioneer Museum at Steinbach and the Reptile Museum on Highway 70 and the Wax Museum in Minneapolis, but she has never even heard of the Museum of Keys in the city of Buffalo, that dark old American city of cracked alleys and beef-colored bricks. A rough place, a tough place—but underlying its rough toughness, buried there like a seam of limestone, is the hoarded and invested money of a dozen or so millionaires no one’s ever heard of, men made rich on meat, screws, plastics, textiles, optics, leather, and the like. One of them, a manufacturer of table silver, established the Museum of Keys some years ago as a showcase for his own extensive key collection.

His interest in keys began at the age of sixty, at a time when he was recovering from a serious heart attack. It was Christmas morning. He was seated in an armchair, a blanket over his knees, ashamed of that soft-fringed covering, ashamed of his cold feet in their slippers and the weak light that drifted in from the eastward-facing window. His wife presented him with an antique porcelain music box shaped like a shepherdess. Always before she had given him practical, manly objects such as fountain pens or fishing gear. What was he to make of a figurine with flounced china skirts, revolving slowly and playing the same merry waltz tune again and again and again? He sensed some covert meaning in his wife’s offering—for there she stood, inches away from him, so rounded, pale-fleshed, and mildly luminous, so timid in her posture and so fragile (with a head that tipped sideways and one hand clasping the pleats of her skirt), though her gaze at the moment of gift-giving was oddly sharpened and sly; she held her breath in her throat as if it were something breakable like ice or glass or part of the solitude she sometimes drew around herself. He loved her, and had never thought of her as a shrewd or demanding woman, yet here she was, waiting to be thanked, that much was clear, to be awarded an explosion of gratitude he had no way of formulating. He was not schooled in such expressions. Tact or shyness had kept him ignorant.

Her name was Anna. He knew, intimately, after thirty years of marriage, the floury cellular creases of her neck and elbows, her breasts, hips, and round, shining ankles; he knew too, or rather sensed, that real intimacy was essentially painful—to those locked in its embrace as much as those shut out. In his confusion, his embarrassment, he seized on the exquisitely fashioned silver key, which at least possessed familiar weight and form.

How beautifully it fit his hand. How concentrated was its purpose. He had only to insert it in the shepherdess’s glazed petticoats, that slender place at the back of her waist that has no name, and the mechanism was engaged. A twist or two released a ruffling of bells in triple meter. In the moment before the music began—and this was the part he grew to love best—there could be heard a brief sliding hum of gears shifting into place, anxious to perform, wonderfully obedient to the key’s delicate persuasion.

The second key he acquired belonged to the lost oak door, or so he imagines it, of a demolished Breton chapel. It is thirteen inches long, made of black iron, rough in texture but beautifully balanced. “Notice the beautiful balance,” he says when showing it off, always employing the same exclamatory phrase and allowing the key to seesaw across the back of his wrist. Some of his other keys—before long there were hundreds—are made of rare alloys; many are highly decorated and set with semiprecious stones, pieces of jade or turquoise. One of the most curious is fifteen hundred years old, Chinese, and another, dating from the days of the Roman Empire, is made so it can be worn on the finger like a little ring. There are keys from the Middle Ages with elaborate, ingenious warding devices and there is also a small, flat, unprepossessing key—entirely unornamented—which is said to be the prototype of the Yale (or pin tumbler) key invented in Middletown, Connecticut, in the year 1848.

The Museum of Keys is located in the southwest corner of the city, admission free, closed on Mondays, and offering school tours every Tuesday. A portrait of Anna ______ , the founder’s wife, 1903-1972, hangs on the wall behind the literature display. Ten thousand visitors come through the doors each year, and often they leave the museum jingling their own keys in their pockets or regarding them with new respect, perhaps thinking how strange it is that keys, the most private and secret parts of ourselves, are nevertheless placed under doormats or flower pots for visiting friends, or hung on a nail at the back of the garage for the gas-meter man, or mailed around the world in padded envelopes, acknowledging in this bitter, guarded century our lapses of attention.