Mao II (8 page)

 

 

Brita was packed and ready anytime. She went downstairs and poured a cup of coffee. She sat at the table and looked around the kitchen. A young woman walked in and softly said Hi. She leaned on the table, using a hand to balance, her left foot raised vaguely off the floor. She had long straight hair, light brown, and a slightly jutting mouth that made her look remorseless.

“How many pictures did you take?”

“We talked and worked a while and then I shot some more rolls when we ran out of conversation and then some more after that.”

“Would you call this an average day or going into the realm of horrid excess?”

“What’s your name?”

“Karen.”

“And you live here.”

“Scott and I.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Karen. I’m not interested in photography. I’m interested in writers.”

“Then why don’t you stay home and read?”

She reached for a box of muffins on the countertop and put it down near Brita’s coffee. Then she curled into a chair and played with a stray spoon. She wore a limp blouse over blue jeans and had the body lines of a teenager, the crooks and skews and smeariness, and a way of merging with furniture, a kind of draped indecision.

Brita said, “I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room.”

“Did you always know you wanted to be a photographer?”

“I read on planes, I read in laundromats. How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And you help out here.”

“Scott does most of it. He manages the expenses, the cash flow, he does taxes, he deals with the utilities, he answers all Bill’s mail except the mentals, which we haughtily ignore lest they get encouraged. We share the cooking and shopping except he probably does more than I do. He does all the filing, the organizing of papers. I clean like a little scrub lady, which I don’t half mind. I make believe I’m fat and walk with a waddle. We do the typing about fifty-fifty, with Scott doing the last spotless copy, and then we proofread together, which is probably our favorite time.”

“And you think it’s a mistake, these pictures.”

“We love Bill, that’s all.”

“And you hate me for leaving here with all that film.”

“It’s just a feeling of there’s something wrong. We have a life here that’s carefully balanced. There’s a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives and now there’s a crack all of a sudden. What’s it called, a fissure.”

The car pulled up, door opened, then closed. Karen tapped the bowl end of the spoon with her index finger, over and over, making the handle go up and down.

“What do you think of marriage for a professional woman?” she said.

“I’m divorced many years. He lives in Belgium. We don’t talk at all.”

“Do you have children that are still torn up over the divorce so that everybody’s tense around each other and you can see the resentment lurking far back in their eyes even after all this time?”

“Sorry, no.”

“I haven’t known many people with careers. It sounds so important. Having a career. Do you keep a bottle of vodka handy in your freezer?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do people tell you they like your work? They come up to you at parties in New York and say, ‘I just wanted to tell you.’ Or, ‘You don’t know me but I just wanted.’ Or, ‘I really have to tell you this and I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion.’ Then you look at them and smile like shyly.”

Scott came in with groceries. He poured a cup of coffee and told the story of his journey out of nonbeing. How he started writing letters to Bill care of his publisher. He wrote nine or ten letters, ambitious and self-searching, filled with things a luckless boy wants to say to a writer whose work has moved him. He hadn’t known he could summon these deep feelings or express them with reckless style and delight, certain cosmic words typed in caps and others spelled oddly to reveal second and third meanings. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things. How he finally got one letter back, two lines, handwritten in a hurry, saying there is never time to respond properly but thanks for writing. How Scott took this as encouragement and wrote five more letters, intense and sweeping, the last of them saying that he was setting out to find Bill, that he needed to see and meet and talk to Bill, that the urge to make a journey in search of the man who wrote these books could no longer be contained. How Bill did not reply. And how Scott took this as encouragement because Bill could have written and said, Forget it, stay away, do not even remotely approach. He had the envelope Bill’s note had come in, postmarked New York City, but Scott happened to know from reading a magazine piece about Lost Writers that Bill concealed his whereabouts by sending letters to his publisher for remailing.

“And so you hitchhiked.”

Yes. He set out thumbing rides at the edges of ripping interstates and the venture was so chancy it made him feel weightless, standing in the wind of rolling diesel rigs. He wore mirrored glasses and carried a timeless Eastern text and he told drivers he was setting out to find a famous writer. Some of them talked about famous people they wished they could meet and it was interesting how very few of these people were alive today. All the famous were either dead or used up. A pickup he was riding in caught fire just west of Fort Wayne and it seemed all right, it seemed appropriate, things were too vivid not to enter deeper states. He was elated, worked to a sensory howl, flying past the low stink of day-to-day. A driver had chest pains outside Toledo and Scott drove him to a hospital, feeling talkative, telling the man the plot of a movie he’d seen last week. The car handled well and he gained in being as he drove, cornering sweetly. I’m glad we had this chance to talk, he said, jogging alongside the gurney as attendants hustled the man into white light. Three days later he had a job in the mailroom at the house that published Bill Gray’s books.

How he made friends. How he learned that the letters Bill sent in to be remailed came in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope addressed to the head of the mailroom, a friendly sleepy former IRA man named Joe Doheny, who opened the envelope and processed the letters in the normal way. Scott waited, living at the Y, eating his meals standing up at narrow counters set along streetside windows so he could watch the march of faces and pathologies, people going by in trance states and dancing manias, the crosstown stream of race and shape and ruin, and in these hard streets even the healthy and well-dressed looked afflicted. Because they were sliding deeper into their own lives. Because they knew the future would not take them. Because they refused to give themselves the necessary narrow structure, the secret destiny. After some weeks he spotted a manila envelope addressed to Joe Doheny in Bill’s close-woven hand. There was no return address of course but Scott looked at the postmark and then went to the library and lugged an atlas to a table and found that the town in question—he did not reveal its name to Brita—was about two hundred miles outside the gates of the medieval city. He was not necessarily relieved to learn that Bill was only hours from New York. It would be just as easy to go to Chad or Borneo or the Himalayas, with perhaps a greater gain in being.

He took a bus part of the way and then hitchhiked on secondary roads, carrying a sleeping bag and other basics. He walked around town and watched the market and the post office, five weekends of vain surveillance. Not that he minded. He had a life now and that’s what mattered. He was in Bill’s material mesh, drawing the same air, seeing things Bill saw. He did not ask people if they knew who Bill was or where he lived. He was a backpacker on the amble, determined to go unnoticed. After weekend five he quit his job and lived in campgrounds in the area and saw a man who had to be Bill getting out of a car in front of the hardware store, only eight days after he’d left the city for good.

“Why did it have to be Bill?”

“Had to be. Not the slightest doubt. How can a photographer ask a question like that? Doesn’t his work, his life show on his face? Are there other people in that one small rural area who might possibly look as though they’d written those books? No, had to be him. Stocky, running his hand through his hair. Walking toward me. Making his way down the street. Becoming more familiar with every step. Had to be Bill and he was coming right at me and I seemed to need oxygen. Important parts of my body were closing down.”

How he stepped up to Bill and told him who he was, the persistent letter-writer, and made an effort to speak slowly and clearly in complete sentences, feeling his mouth dry out and hearing the words come bouncing hollow off his tongue. Hearing the heart noise, a deep staccato in the chest that he’d heard only once before, climbing for hours in mountain country in extreme heat, the sound of blood driving through the aorta and jarring the heart. How he managed to say as Bill’s eyes narrowed to rifleman’s slits that he wondered if the writer had ever thought an assistant might be helpful, someone to handle the mail (he had experience), a quiet individual who would type and file, even prepare meals if there was no one doing this, a person who would try to ease the writer’s beleaguerment (he drew a trace of grim amusement here). And then on instinct simply stopped and let Bill absorb the offer while he stood there looking earnest and dependable. Watching Bill’s face begin to change. How the jaw muscles slackened and the eyes grew calm. A great man’s face shows the beauty of his work.

K
aren was in the bedroom looking at the gift Scott had brought back from the city. It was a reproduction of a pencil drawing called Mao II. She unrolled it on the bed and used objects in reach to hold down the corners. She studied the picture to see what was interesting about it or why Scott thought she might like it. The face of Mao Zedong. She liked that name all right. It was strange how a few lines with a pencil and there he is, some shading in, a scribbled neck and brows. It was by a famous painter whose name she could never remember but he was famous, he was dead, he had a white mask of a face and glowing white hair. Or maybe he was just supposed to be dead. Scott said he didn’t seem dead because he never seemed real. Andy. That was it.

 

 

Scott was washing coffee cups.

Bill came in and said, “What are you doing?”

Scott looked into the basin, running a sponge around the inside of a cup.

“We could walk up to the mill. It’s a nice enough day.”

“You have to work,” Scott said.

“I’ve worked.”

“It’s early yet. Go back and work some more.”

“I’ve put in some good time today.”

“Bullshit. You were having your picture taken.”

“But I caught up. Come on. We’ll get the women and hike to the mill.”

“Go back up.”

“I don’t want to go back up.”

“Don’t start. I’m not in the mood.”

“We’ll get the women,” Bill said.

“It’s early. You ruined your morning with picture-taking. Go back up and do your work.”

Scott held the sponge under warm water, rinsing out the soap.

“We have three hours of light. Ample time to get there and back. ”

“I’m telling you for your own good. It’s your idea to write this book forever. I’m only saying what I’m supposed to say. ”

“You know what you are?”

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah, ”

“Yeah yeah,” Bill said.

“I don’t think you did ten good minutes.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“So go back up and sit down and do your work.”

“We’re wasting all this light.”

“It’s really very simple.”

“It isn’t simple. It’s everything in the world that isn’t simple wrapped up in one small bundle.”

Scott was finished at the sink but stayed there looking into the basin.

“It’s simple all right. It really is. You just go back up and sit down and do your work.”

“The women would enjoy it.”

“I’m only saying what we both know I’m supposed to say.”

“I could go back up and just sit there. How would you know I was working?”

“I wouldn’t, Bill.”

“I could sit there tearing stamps from a twenty-five-dollar roll of stamps with the fucking flag on every stamp.”

“As long as you’re in the room. I want you in the room, seated.”

“I’ll tell you what you are,” Bill said.

Scott reached for a towel and dried his hands but didn’t turn around. He hung the towel on the plastic hook and waited.

 

 

Brita stood outside Bill’s workroom, in the open doorway, looking in. After a moment she reached in and knocked softly on the door even though it was clear the room was empty. She stood motionless and waited. Then she took one step in, looking carefully at the ordinary things inside as if compelled to memorize the details of whatever had escaped the camera—the placement of objects and titles of reference works, the number of pencils in the marmalade jar. Gazing for history’s sake, for the obsessive record of what is on the desk and who is in the snapshots, the oddments that seem so precious to our understanding of the man.

But all she wanted was a cigarette. She spotted the pack, crossed the room quickly and took one out. There were footsteps on the stairs. She found matches and lit up and when Bill appeared in the doorway she gestured with the cigarette and told him thanks.

“I thought you were probably gone,” he said.

“Don’t you know the rules? We wait for dark. Then we go on side roads and no roads to avoid route signs that might tell me where we are.”

“Scott spent weeks on this.”

“It takes twice the time, his way.”

“I think you’re supposed to appreciate the maze aspects.”

“I’ll try harder. But right now I’m keeping you from your work so we’ll meet at early dinner if this is the plan.”