Authors: Francine Prose
“You still not smoking?” Lowell says.
“Barely,” says Vera.
“Good for you!” says Lowell. There’s another pause, then he says, “What else is happening with you guys?”
“Plenty,” says Vera. “Listen. The staff photographer at the paper gave me a photo of an old house with some kids in front of it selling lemonade. So I made up a story and now it turns out that the names and ages I dreamed up are the kids’ real names and real ages. I hit the whole family history right on the fucking head, and now they’re suing me for libel and invasion of privacy.”
“You’re kidding,” says Lowell. “Run that by me again.”
Vera does, partly to make sure he’s got it straight and partly because she likes the version she’s telling: bizarre as ever but somehow less serious. She’s left out the ruined lawn, the damaged cardiology practice, the tiny school careers nipped in the bud. Also the part about her maybe being fired.
“Jesus,” says Lowell. “Synchronicity central.”
“You said it,” Vera says. “I’m going out there to see the kids’ parents Monday, get to the bottom of this—”
“No bottom to get to,” Lowell says. “Just your basic warp in the general weave. They’re usually a good sign. Something special’s on the way. Don’t fight it.”
“I don’t have to fight it,” says Vera. “A whole team of lawyers is fighting it for me.”
“The synchronicity defense,” says Lowell. “I love it. Some guy could make his career on that.”
Vera tries to imagine Mr. Goldblum making his career on the synchronicity defense. She can’t even imagine suggesting it.
“Their suing you is very unprogressive.” Lowell sucks in the end of his sentence.
“I don’t know,” says Vera. “What can I do?”
“Do?” Lowell repeats, a peculiarly rounded tone. He’s blowing smoke rings through the word, like the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland
. “Don’t do a goddamned thing,” he says. “Just hang on. It’ll do
you
.”
And so Vera’s forced to confront what she’s always known. Her version of what went wrong between her and Lowell is like one of Lowell’s own stories: flat, understated, a joke. The truth has less to do with his unique approach to grocery shopping than with this—his hillbilly fatalism. Just hang on, it’ll do you. Though it’s not so different in spirit from what she wants to tell Dave, Lowell’s interpretation of events has always alarmed her. It’s no accident that Lowell’s favorite song is a hymn called “You Can’t Hurry My God”:
He’s the kind you can’t hurry
He’ll be there, don’t you worry
He may not come when you want Him
But He’s right on time.
Right on time? However would one know?
What used to scare her was the possibility that Lowell would always work on the loading dock and on screenplays no one would film; she would always write for the
Downtowner
. Sometimes she thought she knew the whole future, could see their lives sped up like those time-lapse sequences in Disney films that show you all the cacti in the desert blooming at once.
Now, of course, she understands that these were the fears of youth. What’s impossible, she’s since learned, is for anything to stay the same. Nor has her life without Lowell been a model of forward progress. All this might seem reason enough to try once more with him, if not for the evidence: He’s still waiting for some gangster to come along and lend him an old Smith Corona. Putting on your shower sandals every few months and bringing your script to an agent hardly constitutes taking active charge of your life. Lowell’s not what Vera needs, not yet. Still she doesn’t want to lose him and doesn’t like the sound of her voice when she says, “That’s a very sixties attitude. Very spiritual. You know what they call that now? Retro hippie.”
“Go with the flow,” Lowell says. “Don’t push the river. Fuck you.”
Vera would hate the conversation to end this way, but what can she say to that? Finally Lowell says, “Sweetheart? Are you there?”
“Are you stoned?” asks Vera.
“During working hours?” says Lowell. “Stoned as a Wheat Thin.”
“Were you working?”
“Sure. Flat on my back in the sun.” Lowell is always brown. Even in February, in New York, he’d go up to the roof and lie there in his down jacket. Perhaps he’s never gotten over those twenty-four-hour Alaskan winter nights. Vera’s stoned, too, but not so out of it she can’t count. It’s eight
P.M.
in California, not enough sun for anyone.
“Well…” She draws out the word.
“Hey,” Lowell says. “Do you have a copy of that story? Fountain-of-youth lemonade?”
“I don’t think so,” says Vera, but when she checks in her purse, it’s there. She must have taken it from Shaefer’s office.
“Send it to me,” Lowell says. “I’d like to see it.”
“Sure,” Vera says. “I’ll send it right out.”
“All right, then,” says Lowell. “A big kiss and hug to Rosalie.” It sounds as though he’s ending a letter. “And to you.” It
is
the way he ends his letters.
“You, too,” says Vera, and hangs up the phone.
J
UST BEFORE DAWN VERA
dreams she gets a message:
GOD WANTS TO ASK YOU A QUESTION.
God’s holed up in a cheap motel on one of those sleazy strips you find in Western cities. Miracle Miles. Sitting on one of the double beds is a slight, middle-aged Oriental who asks her this: If you found dinosaur bones—a complete and perfectly preserved brontosaurus skeleton—what would you do? Vera doesn’t even have to think. First she’d ship the main bones to the Museum of Natural History. Then she’d take half of what was left and mail it in small packages to her friends. Then she’d hide the remaining fragments all over her house—in the medicine cabinet, the silverware drawer, the spice rack—places she’d find them when she was least expecting it.
This answer seems acceptable and Vera wakes up happy despite the fact she’s sprawled on the living-room couch with all the lights on, nose to nose with a sour, alcohol-smelling glass, an ashtray full of roaches, and the knowledge that the God of her dreams is the former Saigon police chief immortalized by photography in the act of blowing a suspected Viet Cong’s head off; recently she saw him interviewed on
Eyewitness News
in his present incarnation as a prosperous Georgetown restaurateur. Vera’s good mood lasts as long as it takes her to feel something lumpy beneath her and identify it as the crumpled copy of
This Week
she found last night for Lowell.
Already the air’s hot and so sticky you’d think you could walk up the walls like Spiderman. The gray light promises to stay that gray all day. Standing up seems like too much of a commitment; without quite making it, Vera limps to the window and looks out onto the street where, even at this hour, everyone seems to have shopping carts or arms full of brown paper bags. It’s Saturday; and the grocery shoppers have a demoralized, wallflower look—one drawback of living in a neighborhood in which a large percentage of your neighbors know someone with a house in Rhinebeck or Fire Island.
Years ago, when she was freelancing and all seven days were the same, she used to hate weekends, when everyone else seemed so happy; used to envy the secretaries’ Saturdays and even the Monday-to-Friday toil that glorified their days off. And later, when Rosie was small and Lowell was with them, she had some sense of what such weekends could be. Trips to the zoo, the Tibetan Museum, Sleepy Hollow; though she knows it can’t be accurate, her memory is of all those outings taking place on bright autumn afternoons. Then she went to work full-time and back to hating weekends, understanding then that the secretaries’ Saturdays weren’t idyllic at all but occupied with survival, with laundry, shopping, paying bills, with all the essential and tedious chores that the rest of the week left no time for. Often Vera felt like the subject of some cruel experiment, a cat prevented from licking itself five days out of seven.
Some things she likes about weekends: One, not going to work. Two, small, manageable activities like cleaning her apartment. What a strain it was with Rosie toddling at her heels, messing up everything she’d just straightened. Perhaps that’s why God gives you small children: for the rest of your life, certain things seem effortless. Now Rosie’s asleep, will stay asleep till eleven or twelve, then get up and pick up the phone and—depending on everyone’s ballet lessons and divorce settlement visitation rights—get a game of Dungeons and Dragons going. Vera wonders if she’s dreaming of Haunted Thickets or of Carl.
Vera pauses outside the kitchen, contemplating the drainboard, imagining how nice it will look without that bowl of soggy cornflakes on it. She knows Rosie will just leave another one there this morning, but somehow that doesn’t bother her, no more than it bothers her to know that all her bustling around will just be tidying, not cleaning. She’s not interested in dirt she can’t see. The dark brown, copper-flecked oven hides grime and probably always will. The drawer stuffed with bill stubs and phone numbers won’t get emptied or sorted out. If she dies in this apartment, someone else will have to come in and excavate.
That
bothers her; she hates thinking of things she’ll never do: see Africa, live in London, learn Italian, have a son.
Still she has her rituals, her little compulsions like everyone else. Everything that doesn’t belong in the apartment—garbage, dirty laundry, letters and bills to be mailed—has to be out before she can start cleaning.
She puts on jeans and an enormous cotton shirt, which, though certainly too hot, will save her from having to put on a bra. Then she rushes through a preliminary cleanup, throwing out roaches and cornflakes—which remind her of Lowell and of her promise to send him that article from
This Week
. Probably she should reread it every five minutes between now and her visit to the Greens, but she already knows it by heart. So she finds a large manila envelope and stuffs the whole issue in. Of course it would be cheaper to send just the story, but that would mean finding scissors and being more steady-handed than she feels. The next problem is Lowell’s address. It’s on his letter, in her purse; the danger there is of sinking onto the couch and reading it all day. So she looks C.D.’s retro hippie pottery studio up in her address book and considers writing “Big Youth,” but realizes that at any one time there are usually five guys staying there who might answer to that description.
Vera returns to ministering to the garbage, calling on all her willpower to keep from tossing the envelope in. Knowing better than even to look for the wire ties, she knots the tops of the trash bags and takes them downstairs.
Behind a locked door in the first-floor hall are the garbage cans; behind these another locked door leads to the basement and to yet another locked door to the alley where the garbage trucks pull up. The lids are chained to the cans so the Rastafarians can’t steal them and hammer them into drums. All these locks should make Vera feel secure; in fact she can’t throw anything away without expecting some giant hand to grab the back of her neck and push her face in the can. She’s seen too many horror films about mad janitors.
CRAZED CUSTODIAN’S BOILER-ROOM BARBEQUE: DINES ON HUMAN SHISH-KA-BOB.
Vera can’t laugh, she’s holding her breath. By the time she’s out on the street, she’s got spots in front of her eyes and is still fixated on the idea of people carving other people up into bite-sized cubes. She thinks of that surprising quote from Rumi, “The true seeker after God shall value his heart no more than shish-ka-bob.” But what she has in mind is hardly what Rumi meant.
Waiting in line at the post office, Vera realizes she could have slapped on a dollar in twenty-cent stamps and saved herself a trip. The old man behind the counter thinks she’s done the right thing by coming. He weighs the envelope and glues on ninety-six cents’ worth of postage with a tenderness that makes her feel small for being unable to mail a letter herself without the sensation of dropping it into an abyss. The old man’s touch makes it seem safer; his handling bears witness that her parcel exists.
On the way home she buys a paper, and after some more straightening up—a little light sweeping, mopping’s really out of the question—stretches out on the couch with the
Times
. When Rosie was a baby, and later just before Lowell left and neither could pick up a paper without the other one getting mad at them for not doing something else, Vera dreamed of such moments. What she couldn’t have dreamed was that her life would so soon reach a point at which no one cared if she ever put the paper down.
Compared to
This Week
, the
Times
reads like Stendhal. The attention to detail and plot in its coverage of Lebanon recalls Napoleon’s generals’ elegant minuet around the slaughter at Waterloo. Just the number of headlines on the first page is a compliment to its readers’ intelligence, unlike
This Week
’s single, giant head, implying that its audience can only take in one thing at a time. And yet none of the heads are very interesting. It’s as if the
Times
is dozing, waiting for some post-Labor Day invasion to shock it out of its slumber. The paper has a skimpy feel, the same not-really-trying look of the people on the street, as if the reporters also believe that everyone worth writing for is out of town for the weekend.
Vera turns to the page that carries the “Around the Nation” bits. Today there’s a court case from Georgia, where a fundamentalist preacher’s contesting a manslaughter charge with a unique defense: at the moment he rearended a van full of senior citizens, he was receiving a message from his personal saviour and Lord, Jesus Christ. The question is why Jesus would let a pickup he was in personal communication with kill two seniors and put four more in traction. It’s an old chestnut—the problem of evil, free will, Ivan Karamazov and that little girl locked in the outhouse. Vera knows she’s distracting herself so she won’t have to face the fact that she wrote this story months before the accident occurred.
In this case she’s not especially surprised. It’s an accident that’s been waiting to happen. With half the nation declaring for Jesus, half killing each other on the road, it was simply a matter of putting two halves together. It had better be that simple. Vera’s beginning to feel like Ingrid Bergman in
Gaslight
or the heroine of an
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
she once saw, a woman who told her husband each night’s dreams—and during the day they came true. In both instances, the husband was trying to drive his wife crazy. Lowell wouldn’t have to go that far; if he wanted to drive her mad, he could just move back in, turn on the TV, and sit there.