You've Got to Read This (47 page)

"How wonderful," she says, exhaling. "Berries."

"Blackberries," I tell her. "They grow wild here. They grow all over."

"In the city," she says, making an effort, "a dinky little carton costs eighty-nine cents." She smiles. "Say you needed three cartons to make one pie," she asks me, "how much would that cost?"

I blink, one hand on my bathrobe collar.

"Two-sixty-seven." Her smile deepens, dimples. "Two-sixty-seven plus tax when you can buy a whole frozen pie for one-fifty-six, giving you a sav-ings of one-eleven at least. They don't call them convenience foods," Pauline says, "for nothing."

"Are you sure," I ask, after a minute, "you don't want some tea?"

"Oh no!"

"Some coffee?"

"Oh no!"

"A fast glass of wine?"

She chuckles, cheerful, but will not answer. I scan the sky. It's close, but cloudless. If there were to be a thunderstorm—and we often have thunderstorms this time of year—Pauline would have to come in. Or would she? I see her, erect and dripping, defiant.

"Mrs. Dixon," I offer, "had a wonderful recipe for blackber . . . "

"Mrs. Dixon?"

For a second I almost see Pauline's eyes. They are small and tired and very angry. Then she tips her head to the sun and the glasses cloud over again.

"Konrad's mother."

MOLLY GILES • 255

"Yes," she says. She lights another cigarette, shakes the match out slowly. "I know."

"A wonderful recipe for blackberry cake. She used to say that Konrad never liked pie."

"I know."

"Just cake."

"I know."

"What I found out, Pauline, is that he likes both."

"We never eat dessert," Pauline says, her lips small and sad again. "It isn't good for us and we just don't have it."

Stray begins to bark and wheel around the garden and a second later the children appear, Letty first, her blond hair tangled and brambly like mine, then Alicia, brown-eyed like Konrad, and then Sophie, who looks like no one unless—yes—with her small proud head, a bit like Pauline. The children are giggling and they deliberately smash into each other as they zigzag down the driveway. "Oops," they cry, with elaborate formality, "do forgive me. My mistake." As they come closer we see that all three are scratched and bloody with berry juice. One holds a Mason jar half full and one has a leaky colander and one boasts a ruined pocket. Pauline closes her eyes tight behind her dark glasses and holds out her arms. The girls, giggling, jostle toward her. They're wild for Pauline. She tells them stories about kidnappers and lets them use her calculator. With each kiss the wooden railing rocks and lurches; if these visits keep up I will have to rebuild the porch, renew the insurance. I carry the berries into the kitchen, rinse them off, and set them to drain. When I come back outside Pauline stands alone on the porch. Stains bloom on her blouse and along her out-thrust chin.

"Come in," I urge, "and wash yourself off."

She shakes her head very fast and smiles at the floor. "No," she says.

"You see, I have to go."

The children are turning handsprings on the lawn, calling "Watch me!

me! me!" as Stray dashes between them, licking their faces. I walk down the driveway to see Pauline off. As I lift my hand to wave she turns and stares past me, toward the house; I turn too, see nothing, no one, only an old wooden homestead, covered with yellowing vines, a curtain aflutter in an upstairs window, a red door ajar on a dark brown room.

"Thank you," she cries. Then she throws her last cigarette onto the gravel and grinds it out and gets into her car and backs out the driveway and down to the street and away.

Once she turns the corner I drop my hand and bite the knuckles, hard.

Then I look back at the house. Konrad steps out, a towel gripped to his waist. He is scowling; angry, I know, because he's spent the last half hour hiding in the shower with the cat litter box and the tortoise. He shouts for his shoes. I find them toed out in flight, one in the bedroom, one down the hall. As he hurries to tie them I tell him a strange thing has happened: it seems I've grown morals.

256 « PIE DANCE

"What?" Konrad snaps. He combs his hair with his fingers when he can't find my brush.

"Us," I say. "You. Me. Pauline. It's a lot of hooey," I tell Konrad. "It is."

Konrad turns his face this way, that way, scrubs a space clear in the mirror. "Do you know what you're saying?" he says to the mirror.

I think. I think, Yes. I know what I'm saying. I'm saying good-bye. I'm saying, Go home.

And when he has gone and the girls are asleep and the house is night-still, I remember the pie. I roll out the rich dough, flute it, and fill it with berries and sugar, lemons and spice. We'll have it for breakfast, the children and I; we'll share it with Stray. "Would you like that?" I ask him. Stray thumps his tail, but he's not looking at me; his head is cocked, he's listening to something else. I listen too. A faint beat comes from the radio on the kitchen counter. Even before I turn it up I can tell it's a reggae beat, strong and sassy. I'm not sure I can catch it. Not sure I should try. Still, when Stray bows, I curtsy. And when the song starts, we dance.

Greatness Strikes

Where It Pleases

by Lars Gustafsson

Introduced by Charles Baxter

HE HAD BEEN INVITED TO INTRODUCE A STORY AND WAS PULLING

down books from the shelves to reread a few of the old obscure favorites.

They had to be obscure, he thought, or there was no point in introducing one of them. The books were scattered on the floor, and he had to be careful to avoid tripping over them or kicking one of them into the corner. Some of the stories, once reread, no longer seemed quite so appropriate for the occasion, however. Conrad Aiken's "The Woman-Hater" still had its shockingly beautiful paragraph two pages from the end, when the college kid is kissed by a woman he doesn't know and wakes up like Sleeping Beauty, but the rest of the story seemed too drab, too perfunctorily written. Aiken's

"Silent Snow, Secret Snow," about a boy's descent into schizophrenia, was still perfect in its evocation of a child's mental vertigo but was, it seemed, constantly anthologized. Evan Connell's "Arcturus" was too long for inclusion in an anthology, as was Isak Dinesen's "Sorrow-acre." Kipling's "'They'"

could effectively give anyone the shivers. All the same, it seemed, upon reexamination, too tricky by half and culturally unpleasant in the way Kipling could sometimes be. Anyone introducing such a story might feel an urge to apologize for it—a bad way to start. Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine" was bulletproof but, like "Arcturus," too long and hardly obscure. He didn't know enough about some writers and their traditions, Yasunari Kawa-bata's or Bessie Head's, for example, to introduce one of their stories. And he didn't feel like introducing writers who needed no introduction, at least from him: Chekhov or Alice Munro or Italo Calvino. Dozens of others.

Sighing happily, he took down Lars Gustafsson's
Stories of Happy People
and reread "Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases." Probably it was the story he had wanted to introduce all along.

This story, translated by Yvonne L. Sandstroem and John Weinstock, is part of a book first published in Sweden in 1981 whose concern is that most complex and elusive fictional subject, happiness. Happiness is fundamentally antidramatic. For the most part, it resists conflict altogether, having passed beyond it or finessed it. In this sense it is distinct from the emotions of triumph or contentment. There are probably no stories in Paradise, and there are very few stories
about
Paradise. In America we secretly tend to think of happiness as rather dull and banal, middle class, unworthy of our attention, possessed by the likes of Ozzie and Harriet. Gustafsson's protagonists in this book, by contrast, approach happiness warily and treat it as the utterly mysterious condition that it is.

In one story we follow Nietzsche, floating in and out of excruciating migraines in his pension room on the shore of Lago Maggiore, discovering
INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES BAXTER • 259

that he himself is part of a great truth, a wildly humorous and very clever joke in which he is the perfect thing that makes the world not-perfect. In another, we follow two obsessed lovers; in a third, an old Swedish industrial engineer who discovers in the quotations from Chairman Mao a catalyst for remembering a truth buried in his memory and almost obliterated by historical trauma. Whatever happiness Gustafsson's protagonists find, it always has the virtue of a pleasing complexity, like a very oddly shaped crystal.

The subject of, and virtually only character in, "Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases" is what we would call a retarded person, a sort of boy who grows to be a sort of man. The story has no interest in the pathos of this situation, none whatever. It is hardly interested in this character as a
person
at all: his actions and decisions are virtually irrelevant to the story's progress, which is genuine but minimal. All the same, the story is something of a miracle: it induces in the reader a bit of a trance, and in this trance it convincingly por-trays its subject as mysteriously exceptional, godlike.

"Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases" is one of the few stories I know of where time virtually stands still throughout the entire story. Or rather it is experienced in nearly frozen narrative events of almost pure feeling. The story has eliminated transitions: one moment the boy is with his parents; at the next moment he is in a home; then he is a man. Man and boy are virtually the same. Nothing leads to anything else. Nothing has to. Instead, one scene
yields
to another, as dough in the oven yields to the heat to become bread, or as the front of a crowd changes direction because of some pressure from the rear. Everything within the story—grass, mushrooms, wood saws—is defamiliarized, an object for endless contemplation.

The protagonist (he has no name) has almost no words, does not own the words that are used against him, but recognizes that the strong, unlike him,
do
own the words and use them to punish others, including himself, and to order the business of the world. Gustafsson's story is involved in a very tricky maneuver here, because all this must come to us through words and a literary language that the boy and subsequently the man do not possess. The words of the story must induce a feeling for his perceptions even though the perceptions do not come to him in exactly this form.

"He had no words for the world, and birds' suddenly flying up was one of the thousand ways in which the world would turn
unreliable."
That's the horror. But the story is dominated by pleasures, slow-seeming ones: "
The
trees are so happy, he thought, when the wind comes. That gives them something to do."

We all have intuitions that we don't exactly have the words for, especially when we're children. These intuitions probably have the form of shaped sensory perceptions or emotions that have what amounts to a distinct outline. Henry James, in his preface to
What Maisie Knew,
argues that fiction, or at least
his
kind of fiction, shouldn't be stuck with only the language that the characters themselves possess. By a certain sleight-of-hand, the writer gives to the character the language that the character deserves, a
260 • GREATNESS STRIKES WHERE IT PLEASES

language that honors the character's intuitions. Our feelings can be sophisticated even when our language is not.

The narrator of "Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases," as I've said, never takes pity on the subject of the story. What he does is much odder. He gives him instead the benefit of his intelligent and informed fascination and curiosity. He engages in a thought experiment in which the young man is granted
nobility,
free from condescension. This character gradually becomes an ambassador from and then a monarch of a country that the rest of us know almost nothing about but can still perceive. It is the country of contemplation-without-thought .

In a world that had no center, he reigned like a quiet monarch, too self-evident ever to feel that his own order was being threatened, too rich to demand anything from the poor, an envoy in chaos serving an order so noble that it was also able to accept the necessity of disorder.

That's beautiful. And in its simple complexity—there
is
such a condition—it gives an inkling of the almost stationary beauty of the story's conclusion, where Gustafsson's protagonist begins to take on the mind of a mushroom, which is also the mind of God.

Sitting in his chair, so fat he spills out over the edges, this nameless character ends in an exalted, ethereal state, both weighed down and lifted up, that cannot truly be shared by anyone capable of reading this story. The boy who has been excluded from everything wordly, worldly, and human has now attained a state that you, the reader, can only read about but never have in quite the way he has it.

The final six paragraphs of this story are remarkable and hair-raising.

The story has stopped progressing, in its unusual manner. Instead, and at some distance from you, it turns, very very slowly, like a wheel in the sky.

The chords are slow and sustained, and they are in no hurry to get anywhere because they have already arrived at their destination. It is like the music of Thomas Tallis or what we know of the conversation of angels.

Light floods through everything, and we enter something like the mind of the infinite, which is still the mind of a retarded boy, shockingly apart from the rest of us, hugely beautiful, and great.

Greatness S t r i k e s W h e r e

It Pleases

Lars G u s t a f s s o n

Translated by Yvonne L. Sandstroem and John Weinstock

He came from one of the small farms up by the woods; strange things come from there now and then.

Tumbledown barns in the meadows, sometimes with the ridge of the roof broken right in the middle, small cow barns made from cinderblock, unusable after the milk trucks got too wide for the small roads.