Authors: Francine Prose
When D.C. police arrested a man for rummaging through the garbage in Washington’s chic Northwest, little did they know that their suspect was in fact an uncivilized creature who had never known human society and had lived his whole life in the refuse-strewn alleys of our nation’s Capitol.
“That’s me,” he says with a proud grin that might have been winning if it hadn’t revealed a set of neatly matched brown stubs.
“Wow,” says Carmen.
Vera knows it’s not him. One thing she’s sure of is that she wrote the story soon after seeing
The Wild Child
for the second time. She can’t recall where she saw the film or with whom, but she clearly remembers coming home and going into Rosalie’s room and hugging her sleeping body because the movie had made her feel she’d betrayed her by teaching her how to live in the world. A few days later she decided to write about a feral child in some American city and, needing a place with alleys and lots of good garbage, chose Washington.
Carmen reads on:
When first questioned, the D.C. garbage-prowler could only reply with a series of purrs and growls.
“This guy can’t talk,” says Carmen. “You talk.”
“Go on,” he says.
But after six months of intensive therapy at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Felix Sylvester—christened by nurses after the two well-known cartoon cats—called a special press conference to tell his astonishing story.
Abandoned by his parents in infancy, Sylvester was soon adopted by a pack of alley-wise cats who taught him where to find the best garbage and the coziest sleeping places and to operate so smoothly that he was never once spotted by a fellow human. Sylvester declined to name the brand of cat food he was stealing when police caught up with him.
Carmen wrinkles her face. “Cat food! Even I could get skinny on that. Hey, maybe you could get into one of those cat chow commercials. Like Morris, you know Morris?” Suddenly she turns serious. “Listen, honey, I’m telling you. They don’t pay nothing here. Public domain, you know what that means? Means they don’t pay for your story unless you write it yourself.”
“I don’t want money,” he says. “I want to meet the lady who wrote this.” He chops the paper again.
“What lady? Nobody’s name’s on this.”
“I know that,” he says. “Just like I know a lady wrote this. I feel it here.” He punches himself in the heart. “And whoever she is, she’s beautiful, man. Maybe not on the outside, but down deep in her soul. She knows me. She understands my whole life and everything I’ve been through without my telling her. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want to bother her none. I just want to make contact. To say, ‘Thank you, beautiful lady.’”
The line about not wanting to hurt her has driven Vera’s shoulders up to her ears. She can feel the blood leaving her face. Luckily he doesn’t notice; luckily Carmen does. Carmen’s laugh is high-pitched and ear-splitting and lasts so long it dopplers back on itself.
“What’s so funny?” the wild boy asks, his tone midway between a howl of pain and a death threat.
“I just remembered who
did
write that story,” Carmen says, gulping air. “Gomez. Eduardo Gomez. Fifty, with a belly out to here and a little
maricón
boyfriend and three daughters in expensive parochial school, Our Lady of Victory, costs twelve hundred fifty a year. You want to meet
Gomez
?”
Vera thinks: She should be
writing
for us.
“You don’t want to meet Gomez,” Carmen’s saying. “I’ll tell you what you need. You need to find yourself a wild girl to keep you company. Some nice girl to run the alleys and share your Purina with you.”
“There isn’t any wild girl,” he says. “There’s just me.”
“Sure there is,” says Carmen. “If there’s you there’s another one like you. Like the Bible says, God commanded Noah to bring in the beasts of the earth, two by two. Why would it say two if there
wasn’t
two…?” A few more minutes of this has Vera convinced. And why not? It’s what everyone wants to hear.
“Go back to Washington,” says Carmen. “She’s out there. Look for her in those alleys. You’ll find her.”
There’s one last, long moment while the wild boy’s face dances through all the possibilities from stabbing Carmen through the heart to asking her to marry him. Then he smiles and comes as near to radiance as those raccoon eyes and teeth will probably ever come. “Thanks,” he says, and leaves without ever suspecting how close he’s been to the beautiful lady of his dreams.
Vera’s nearly limp with relief and at the same time charged with the strangest desire to run after him yelling, “Wait! There is no wild girl out there! Don’t bother looking!” For of all her doubts about
This Week,
this—this message of false hope—is what bothers her most. Your dead loved ones aren’t really dead. Cucumber slices will cure your arthritis. Elvis is alive and well on Mars. Your alien lover is at this very moment winging toward you via UFO. It’s not true, Vera thinks. None of it. Searching for your long-lost feral bride will only bring further loneliness and disappointment.
It takes all she has to convince herself: This is no time to start telling the truth. She turns to Carmen and puts out her palm and Carmen slaps her five. “Who’s Gomez?” she asks.
“My brother-in-law,” says Carmen.
Carmen and Vera came to
This Week
around the same time but didn’t become friends till a year or so later when Vera called in sick to take Rosie to the circus, and there on line for cotton candy was Carmen, clinging to some guy with slicked-back hair and a satin baseball jacket. Figuring she’d called in sick, too, Vera pretended not to see her. But they met head on in the menagerie. Carmen kissed Vera’s cheek with sticky lips and said, “This is Frankie, my fiancé.” Up close, Frankie was handsome in a slightly reptilian way, with eyes to match his jacket—such an unnatural, Emerald-City-of-Oz green that Vera couldn’t help asking if they were real. “Hey, where’s she from?” he asked Carmen. “Outer space?” The next day Carmen told Vera that Frankie played sax in a salsa band and his friends called him the Lizard.
Now, four years later, Carmen and Frankie are still engaged, though recently Frankie’s had a fight with a conga drummer and, out of spite, enlisted in the army. Carmen hopes it’s for the best; he’s promised her and his parents he’ll train as a physical therapist. Vera still wants to warn her: “Carmen, don’t marry a man called the Lizard!” Still thinks of the headline,
I MARRIED AN IGUANA
, and a lead paragraph about a bride who discovers—too late!—her new husband’s body covered with scales. But she’s learned her lesson from Hazel: Some stories are better unwritten. Besides, what good would it do? Carmen believes in her soul that she and Frankie have been paired by God to walk hand in hand up the gangplank to Noah’s ark.
Now she says, “Carmen,
qué pasa
? What’s new with Frankie?”
“Oh God.” Carmen sighs. “He called last night from Fort Benning. He’s already quit physical therapy and switched to band. He’s so lazy,” she says, with so much love and pride that Vera has to look away, up over Carmen’s head at the
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
sign on the wall. Those words used to make her feel murderous. But in Carmen’s case, she senses something well meant and gracious and even beatific about them, something to do with purity and the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost.
“We’re no good on the phone,” says Carmen. “Long distance. I get things wrong and then we hang up and…I don’t know.
Qué pasa
with you?”
“
Nada
,” says Vera.
“That’s what you think,” she says.
At first Vera thinks she’s showing her the same kindness she’s shown the wild boy, telling her what she needs to hear, that her life can’t go on like this—just
This Week
and Rosalie and
nada
else except odd longings toward boys with beautiful hands on the subway. But gradually, as Carmen goes on, she understands that the news she has for Vera is anything but reassuring, is in fact so disturbing that the only way Vera can calm herself is to shut her eyes and picture that Texaco station with those fifty cartons of cigarettes just waiting to be dragged off to some safe, cool burrow in the piny woods and smoked five or six at a time.
V
ERA HAS A SPECIAL
feeling for Bigfoot. At
This Week
, everyone wants to make the front page, and Vera’s first front-page story was
I MARRIED BIGFOOT
. It told of an Oregon housewife, missing and long presumed dead, who reappeared claiming to have been kidnapped from her kitchen by Bigfoot, whose patient vegetarian ways—so different from her carnivore human hubby’s—won her heart. Bigfoot taught her the secrets of the forest; she taught him the harmony line to “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Then gradually Bigfoot’s passion cooled. He began spending more time away in the wilderness, until one night he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.
Vera has no idea where this story came from, except that when Shaefer and Esposito hired her, they gave her a stack of old
This Week
s, and she noticed how Bigfoot stories appeared at least once a month. Mostly these were reports of sightings and such, so that
I MARRIED BIGFOOT
was a kind of landmark in Bigfoot literature, changing the focus, bringing Bigfoot home. What pleases Vera is that she was able to write it without coming close to her own Bigfoot fantasy, which is this:
Vera and the people she loves most—Rosie, Lowell, her friend Louise, her parents—are (and this is the hardest part to imagine) camping in the forest. One morning Bigfoot appears. And though they’re surprised, not even Rosie is scared. His approach is so hesitant and mild, he could be a fifteen-foot two-legged dog come for love. He brings them trout and honey and watercress salad; he cooks breakfast. Then, purposely shortening his stride, carrying Rosie so she won’t trail behind and fall into his footprints, he leads them to his lair. It’s one of those phantasmagorical rag-and-branch kingdoms hermit folk-carvers build, only Bigfoot’s is better hidden. He treats them like guests from a foreign country whose language he doesn’t speak. He teaches them what he can. After a week they leave, more closely bound by their memory of those seven days than by love itself.
Of course, she’ll never write
OUR WEEK WITH BIGFOOT
. It’s too private and lacks all the juicy details that
This Week
readers have come to expect. Still, Vera likes to calm herself by imagining it on nights when she can’t sleep and at difficult moments like this one, when Carmen’s just given her the bad news. Today she adds smoking cigarettes with no harmful physical consequences to the list of things she and her loved ones and Bigfoot will do.
The bad news is that Frank Shaefer and Dan Esposito were on the phone with some lawyer at eight this morning. Then they called their own lawyer; then they went out. What Carmen and Vera don’t have to say is that Shaefer and Esposito
never
leave. They send out for lunch. They’re the first to arrive, the last to go home, and when they do, you can almost see something sticking and stretching and breaking like bubble gum on a shoe.
Now Frank’s left instructions for Vera and Mel Solomon, the staff photographer, to be in his office first thing after lunch. “What’s it about?” says Vera, knowing Carmen’s overheard more than she’s letting on. “It’s probably nothing,” says Carmen.
It takes Vera less than a minute to walk to her office and even less than that to jump to the conclusion that she’s written something libelous. She’s feared—been taught to fear—this since her first day at
This Week
, when Frank Shaefer told her the cautionary tale of how her unlucky predecessor was fired for writing about a silent movie queen returning from the dead, only to learn that the actress was still alive and well enough to sue. “The bottom line,” Frank had said, “is to know who’s alive and who’s dead.” Vera assured them she was a journalist; she had principles, ethics, checked facts. Facts? Shaefer and Esposito exchanged knowing looks, and then with a rueful little smile Dan said, “Look, it’s better all around if you make it up.” “What Dan’s saying,” explained Frank, “is that we’re mostly concerned with that gray area—it
could
be true, it just
isn’t
true.”
Since then reminders have appeared on Vera’s desk, xeroxed clippings from other papers. Vera’s favorite dates from when E. Howard Hunt was working for the CIA, writing spy thrillers on the side, and having to submit his final drafts for security clearance because his most fantastic scenarios so often turned out to be classified information. Scrawled over the clipping is Frank Shaefer’s note: “Too close for comfort!” When Carol Burnett sued the
Enquirer
, Shaefer and Esposito called a meeting to remind the staff their search for truth need take them no further than the Teletype. Let the wire services take the heat. They hadn’t started a paper like
This Week
to have reporters yelling, “Stop the presses!” Whole nations might be changing hands in the jungles of Asia and Latin America, but the only jungles that matter here are those remote pygmy hideouts where the brontosauruses still graze. And so while the competition delves ever deeper into celebrity scandal,
This Week
never mentions a famous name unless the context is innocuous or inspirational (
DEBBY BOONE: I GAVE UP JAVA FOR JESUS
) or, on rare occasions, disguised as letters to the editor (“Dear Sirs: If you ask me, somebody should lock up those Charlie’s Angels and throw away the key till they put on underwear like decent Christian women”).
Of course, for every Washington Wild Child who shows up at the office, three more write letters containing the line, “I have contacted my lawyer.” Presumably their lawyers are charging stiff fees for what Carmen does for minimum wage: convincing the insulted and outraged they don’t have a case. The same person rarely writes twice. So if Shaefer and Esposito are seeing their lawyer, someone has something solid.
Suddenly Vera’s seized by the urge to go home and get into bed and start the day over again. She thinks of how, in primitive cultures, magicians often advise bewitched clients to undo spells by doing everything backward. She considers backing down into Herald Square, onto the subway, and up to her apartment. Perhaps she could take it even further, back before she came here to work and wound up where she is now—dreading the prospect of facing Shaefer and Esposito, of losing a job she doesn’t want and doesn’t want to lose.