The Cry of the Sloth

  And then there’s the case of the lost notebook. It was one in which I had been jotting bits and pieces for a couple of stories I am working on. The house was really quite bare, most of the smaller things—books, pictures, most of the clothing, most of the debris—packed in boxes in the living room, rugs rolled up and shoved against the walls, empty drawers stacked on top of dressers, etc. Few hiding places of the usual sort remained except under all the papers, photos, and magazines strewn on the desk and floor, and this was the first place I looked. It was not there. After combing the house up and down, I became convinced that in my haste to get everything packed up I had inadvertently stuck the notebook in one of the boxes. I could not see any other explanation. But which box? I knew it had to be in one of the half dozen or so I had packed since last seeing it a few days before, yet I had no way of distinguishing the suspect boxes from several dozen similar ones with which they had now become mingled. You see, whenever I finish a box I don’t simply place it on top of a stack, heave it up there and just walk off. Or rather, I do that, but then I always come back later and move it. I often rearrange my boxes, for a variety of reasons, and I must have restacked them all several times before it dawned on me that the notebook was almost certainly in one of them, and by that time there was no way I could possibly deduce, just by standing there thinking about it, which of the many boxes (at this point they were more than forty) was the culprit. From that point of view they were identical, and all I could think to do was unpack them one at a time. Once I had decided on this course of action, I tore through them like a madman, flinging the contents helter-skelter onto the floor, along with huge quantities of balled-up newspaper. The hunt took most of a day and by the end of it the entire surface of the living room was covered with stuff. And it’s that way still; I haven’t had the heart to repack any of it. I had emptied every single box, I had individually examined every item, shaken every book before flinging it, all in vain. Then yesterday evening, just as I was preparing to sit down to supper—a salami and tomato sandwich and a small whiskey—I noticed the notebook lying in full view on the kitchen table.

  It’s interesting that you have taken up writing. Who hasn’t these days? I’ll be glad to look over your MS, if that is what you’re asking.

  Andy

  SEPTEMBER

  Dear Bob, Eric, and Juan,

  I have received another complaint about the noise. You will have to turn it down after 10 or find another place. Wear clothes when you go to the basement with your laundry. Think of the people in the other apartments, who are not as young as you are, have to get up and go to work, and are religious to boot. None of that is their fault.

  Sincerely,

  Andrew Whittaker

  The Whittaker Company

  ¶

  Dear Fern,

  I have the new poems and photographs.

  They came in the same mail as a letter telling me of my mother’s death. It was an expected death, one that mercy would have sent sooner, though it has left a small gap nonetheless. The world tilts at an odder angle, and at night I dream of boats.

  So I guessed correctly—the self timer was the problem. The new photographs are much improved, so much so that I made the mistake of propping one of them up on my desk, the one of you with the cat on the sofa. I ought to have known better. I am, as you have probably guessed, a single man, practically the archetypical “confirmed bachelor,” and the abrupt appearance on my desk of a large photograph showing an attractive young lady on a sofa, in an attitude that can only be described as languid, provoked a spate of good-natured teasing from some of the staff, the older women especially. They are loveable old hens in the main, so I tried not to show my irritation, but needless to say, your pictures now resides harmlessly in a drawer.

  I am not sure I understand what you mean by “loosening it up”—what it are you referring to?—but I do sense more spontaneity in the poems and the photos, and this I consider a good thing, since spontaneity can induce surprises. I myself enjoy being surprising, becoming startling just when people think I am asleep, or, contrariwise, falling asleep while they are waiting to be surprised. Please convey my compliments to your school friend. It’s the true photographer who can pick out the exact right moment to press the button. I suppose she knows the work of Cartier-Bresson, the best of the slice-of-life school, where knowing when to push the button is pretty much all there is to it. If not, I’d be happy to pass along an edition I have here at the office, as that stuff doesn’t really interest me.

  I couldn’t help noticing that, in addition to the relaxed smile on your face, you have made other changes to the photos—I mean, of course, the garment you have on in the shot that shows you throwing off the covers, if “garment” is not too big a word for such an exiguous item. I would not have thought you could buy a thing like that in Rufus. You’re a very remarkable girl indeed. Such contradictions! Talking to a friend the other day, I described your earlier poems as “childlike and ribald.” I hope you don’t mind. I don’t know what to call these new ones. What have you been reading? I suggest you don’t hand any of these in to old Mr. Crawford! And in your person too, there is the contrast between your face, wide-eyed and youthful, and the rest of you, which, as you surely know, seems amazingly developed. Where are your parents while all this is happening?

  I am delighted you found my “Meditations of an Old Pornographer” exciting, even on a second reading, though I did wince at one thing you said. I called the story a literary fabrication, it is true, but that does not mean, as you assume, that it is therefore “insincere” or “just some made-up stuff.” In an extenuated and yet profound sense every writer of fiction has to become, indeed must be already, every character he creates. So of course I harbor somewhere, if harbor is the word, impulses and desires similar to those of the old pornographer, including the ones you call “fantastically kinky,” by which I suppose you mean the soap and cucumber thing or the stuff with the rubber band. Though I don’t want to pry, I would be interested in knowing, when you say the story was exciting, whether you mean a general sort of literary excitement or something else. One is always uncertain, and of course always curious, about how people of the opposite sex are going to take things.

  So you really like Dahlberg Stint’s work. I had forgotten the issue containing his piece was among the ones I had sent you. Sorry, though, I can’t send anything else of his—the story you read is the only thing we’ve published, or that anyone has published, as far as I know. You are right—it is intense stuff, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call him an incredible genius. These days I think of him more as a sad case. The stuff he has submitted lately is so bad some of us are convinced he couldn’t possibly have written those hardware stories. Of course, we’d love to know who the real author is, but we hesitate to ask Stint directly, since he seems to be only marginally sane.

  If you have taught tennis at summer camp, you must be good at it. I play a fair game myself, though some people won’t play me on the grounds that I am too aggressive.

  I have been publishing Soap for seven years. It has meant personal sacrifice and a lot of drudgery, and many times I have wanted to throw the whole thing up and concentrate instead on my own work, which currently sits in neglected heaps on my desk at home, in boxes shoved under beds, and in the case of a couple of short stories, in a filing-cabinet drawer which is stuck hopelessly shut. But then, just when I am saying to myself, “Andy, why not chuck the whole thing?” I come across a talent like yours, and it all seems worthwhile again. I felt I ought to tell you this.

  With contributors all over the country, plus conferences and lectures, I am forced to travel about rather more than I would like. I can’t tell you how many poems and stories I have started while sitting in hotels and airports. Looking at my schedule I see that next month has me passing by car just a stone’s throw from Rufus. It occurs to me that I could stop by and say hello, perhaps meet you somewhere in town. You might like to join me for coffee or lunch. I hope
you won’t feel I am being forward. I could bring my racquet. What do you think?

  Sincerely,

  Andy Whittaker

  ¶

  Dear Dahlberg,

  I think you would find it a lot easier to get people to like you if you made an effort to think of someone besides yourself. I’ve gone out on a limb for you. You can’t imagine the kind of shit I had to put up with after publishing your work. While that does not mean that I regret having done it, it was still a lot of shit and you might show some gratitude. IT HURTS AND DISTRESSES ME to read the stuff you keep sending. I think you should be made aware that I am not a young man. I am under tremendous pressure all the time. I have noises in my chest. So why don’t you just fucking lighten up?

  Andy

  ¶

  The whump of the tailgate startled Adam from his reveries, shredding the web of his thought much as an orb weaver’s intricate pattern, stretched in dewy splendor athwart a woodland path, is shredded by the dull face of an insensitive hiker. He heard the long scraping sound made by the heavy timbers sliding from the back of the truck. This was a sound he knew well, for as a younger, stronger man, more integrated personally, he had worked in construction, and for a moment he imagined he was back on the job. He sprang from the stained and lumpy mattress, half expecting to find his tool belt with his rip-claw Estwing hammer lying on a chair next to his steel-toed work boots. This was, alas, but another trick played by a cruel mind on its hapless owner. In the past three days he had eaten nothing but some berries he had found growing wild along the shore, and now, weakened by hunger, his legs gave way beneath him and he fell numbly to the floor, striking his head against the iron bed with a dull metallic thud. Out in the yard Flo heard the noise, but thought it was an eighty-pound sack of hog feed being tossed to the ground, for that is what it most resembled.

  Adam must have lost consciousness, for when he opened his eyes again the air was filled with the throaty growl of a large lawnmower. Cursing his own weakness, he staggered to his feet and stumbled over to the window. He was filled with a silent incohesive rage. She was already on her fifth pass, and a wide swath of mowed meadow grass now stretched bleakly between the shack and the road. He recognized the girl on the bicycle, the girl who had been on a bicycle the last time he saw her. Now she sat perched on the high metal seat of a big green mower and with flicks of her wrist was deftly steering it this way and that. He noticed she was mowing in back and forth passes, which required her to turn the machine completely around at the end of each pass, rather than using the more efficient method of mowing in continuous circles of ever-decreasing radii. As he watched, the tractor suddenly lurched to a halt, the engine moaned in almost human agony, and died with a little puff of white smoke from beneath the engine cowl. “Damn,” she chirped, and her voice was clear and bright as the water of the great lake flashing in postmatinal splendor behind her. She hopped lithely to the ground. She knelt on all fours, bending low and curving her back as she reached far under the chassis in order to pull a tenacious mass of thorny brambles from the drive shaft. He noticed she was wearing cut-off jeans. He noticed the sinewy calves and muscular thighs and the small tight buttocks. And once again something tugged at his memory.

  She was aware of his gaze upon her. It was oddly warm and moist, as if he were caressing her with his eyeballs, and she shivered with mingled fear and pleasure. Flo had lived long enough to know the terrible hunger lurking in the eyes of womanless men. She had felt it on the lonely streets of Kearney, Nebraska, where, as a young girl away from home for the first time, she had worked for the post office as a substitute mail carrier in training, while earning a degree in English from the university. Oh, but that was long ago, before her mother’s slow death from ovarian cancer and her father’s accident had brought her back to the farm, to the long days of backbreaking labor and the lonely nights reading Chaucer in her room, and now the sick chickens! Though she would not admit it to anyone, she missed the gazes. She had felt a strange excitement at the knowledge that the men, sitting on benches sipping from brown paper sacks or leaning from the high cabs of cross-country rigs idling at traffic lights, were undressing her in the streets. She had been aware of the way the strap of the mail bag crossed between her breasts, pulling her shirt taut against them. And she also had been aware that through some mysterious action at a distance she was causing tumescences and spasms in the bodies of those who saw her.

  And now, as she worked at the tangle of briar and weed wrapping the drive shaft, she felt it again. Adam had come out onto the porch and was leaning heavily against the wall.

  She walked over, wiping her hands on the back of her shorts. She stood at the bottom of the steps looking up at him. She noticed the goose egg on his forehead.

  “You’re hurt,” she said. She wanted to go closer, but something held her back, for she was wary of this stranger standing before her.

  He did not answer right away, but continued to look at her, his eyes moving up and down her slim body. She felt his eyes removing her garments one by one. She noticed a change in the cries of the gulls. “Just a bump,” he said at last.

  Now she noticed the berry stains on his hands and mouth. She remembered a Chippewa legend. She lifted her arms as his eyes clasped the bottom of her t-shirt and lifted it. The gulls cried demonically.

  God, what shit!!!

  Flo lay on her back in a bed of tall grass pressed flat by the tumult of two writhing bodies. Two bodies that a moment before had cleaved to each other in the explosive thrust of passion, but now lay apart, spent and exhausted. She thought of empty shotgun shells lying in a field after a dove shoot. She looked at the clouds drifting overhead, going who knows where. Something was troubling her about this man, this place. There was something odd. Perhaps it was just that the gulls had fallen silent, or … “Where’s your car?” she asked lazily.

  Adam sat bolt upright, all his senses suddenly alert. He had forgotten about the car! He saw it in his mind’s eye on the main street of the small farming town where he had left it three days before with fifty cents in the meter. Too late now. He thought of the inevitable confrontation with the towing company, and he looked down at Flo’s naked body in the grass beside him as if for the last time.

  ¶

  IF WASHER FAILS TO START AFTER INSERTING QUARTERS, NOTIFY LANDLORD. DO NOT KICK IT!

  ¶

  Fontini!

  I was in my study working late last night when I was startled by the sound of breaking glass. I found on my living room floor what I presume to be your brick. This was, I suppose, a witty follow-up to your series of insulting postcards. (These I have turned over, along with the brick, to the police for analysis. Did you think of wearing gloves?) It is noble of you to want to avenge what you perceive as my insults to Mrs. Fontini, that cow. I suggest that having achieved whatever emotional solace one gets from hurling masonry, you now desist from further mischief.

  Watchfully yours,

  Whittaker

  p.s. Where’s my money?

  ¶

  Dear Jolie,

  Well, after spending I don’t know how many hours last week staring at the photographs from Mama’s box, I have found him (me) at last, thanks to a transparent plastic grid I rescued from your art supply satchel before I tossed it out (you should have sent me that list). I placed the photos one at time on the kitchen table. I laid the grid on top and scrutinized each photo through a magnifying glass, one square at a time, using the grid as guide. This is the technique the police use when they search a house for something very small, a minute fragment of bone from the victim, for example. They lay an imaginary grid over the whole house, and then they search the squares one after another. You have to check off each square as soon as you have looked in it, and you keep doing this until there are no squares left.

  You can see how in the case of the photographs this was the way to go. Unless I had been sent away someplace (and wouldn’t I remember that?), I surely must have blundered into at least one or two of
the hundreds of snapshots: a clumsy, not-very-observant boy lumbering after a ball, perhaps, or tumbling down the steps ahead of an outsized father brandishing a belt, to explode into the viewfinder just as the shutter flew open. Of course they would have made a mental note to destroy that picture when it came back from the developer, but, I asked myself, would they always have remembered? How important, I reasoned, could my absence have been to them? Somewhere along the way, might they not have let a small fragment of bone slip into a crack? Perhaps they failed to notice me lurking in the distant background, maybe even hiding there.

  So I sat myself at the kitchen table, all the photos in a big box on a chair beside me, and I scrutinized them one at a time, centimeter by centimeter, occasionally using a pair of calipers constructed from two pencils and a rubber band to gauge relative size and distance. After scanning each photo I marked it with a big D for “Done,” though that could also stand for “Devoid of me” or even “Dud.” My efforts, in the end, were not in vain. I was able to discover myself not once but three times: first as a vase, then as a dog, and finally as a strange boy peering from behind an obese woman. You laugh. I mean for you to laugh, though I am not joking.

  Exhibit One. This is a snapshot of Peg, age about twelve, in shorts and halter. She is directing a jet of water from a garden hose against the side of a large black vehicle parked in the driveway. I think it is a 1938 LaSalle. The water is ricocheting from the car into her face. Judging by her smile, she seems not to mind this, and that fact, plus the shorts and halter, tells me the weather is very warm. A house, which I suppose is the house we lived in at the time, looms behind her, two stories, unremarkable. We lived in so many houses, moved so frequently, that I have only a jumble of architectural fragments as memory of them, a door here, a water-stained ceiling there. As for the house in the photograph, I notice white curtains on the windows downstairs; on the windows upstairs there are canvas shades. One shade has been drawn all the way down. Perhaps someone is asleep in that room, even though the little shadow puddled at Peg’s feet tells us it is the middle of the day. Perhaps the person in that room has a hangover. Now look closely, as I did, and you will see what appears to be an oviform vase sitting on the interior sill of the window adjacent to that one. There is a wire screen on that window and this, combined with the smallness of the photo, makes it impossible to resolve the image into a shape which will be entirely unambiguous. There are stalks of things that appear to be flowers projecting from its top. I looked at it through the loupe. I scratched my chin and then my nose, foraging for a clue, and then it came to me: Why did I assume the egg-shaped thing was a vase? Why couldn’t it just as well be a head? Why shouldn’t it be? The longer I spent studying the picture, the more intensely I could feel myself pressing my nose to the wire screen as I tried to peer down from the window of my stifling little closet of a room at Peg having fun with the hose.