Authors: Francine Prose
In the May 14 issue,
MILLIONAIRE LEOPARD-LOVER LEAVES T-BONE TRUST TO ZOO
sounds familiar. Could this really have happened? Vera remembers a trip to the zoo—steering Rosie past a catatonic gorilla and thinking she’d shielded her from that particular horror until Rosie began waking up with gorilla bad dreams for three weeks in a row. She remembers Louise writing a poem about it, Lowell telling her, there’s no shielding
anyone
from the gorilla. But that was years ago. Rosie couldn’t have been more than four.
What’s happened to all her bylines? She can’t find a one. Frustration is making Vera feel catatonic herself. Nothing seems possible. She’s thirty-seven years old and, except for Rosalie, has no one but two parents still fighting the Spanish Civil War, an ex-husband writing letters on a gangster’s typewriter, a sometime lover who is at this moment photographing himself sticking knives into a teenage nun. Entirely unmemorable six-month chunks are crumbling away from a life already half gone.
Pushing the stack of
This Week
s away, Vera thinks: A morgue is a morgue. Mavis should come in about now to suture up the mess. Closing her eyes, Vera listens to the air conditioner. Then suddenly the room goes silent. And when she looks up again, everything seems brighter. For in the interim she’s realized: If she’s fired today, she’ll never forget—Friday, August something, the day she lost her job. At least she’ll remember that! All at once the details of this room seem so permanent, so clear—she feels as if she’s taken a photo.
In that moment Vera’s triumphant; she feels like Proust. Thinking madeleines, butter, sugar, thinking lunch, she’s halfway out the door before she realizes: The silence she’d heard is just the click of Mary Alice’s air conditioner automatically shutting off in its search for the ideal climate for eternal newsprint life.
T
HOUGH VERA WOULD NEVER
admit it, she’s scared of the office at lunch. It’s safe enough with Shaefer and Esposito and half the staff always there. By rights, she should be more uneasy on those occasional Saturdays when she comes in and the place is deserted. But she isn’t. The office at lunch feels like one of those spots in fairy tales—the graveyard at midnight, the bayou beneath the full moon—those confluences of place and time where you just shouldn’t be. So by the first rustle of brown paper bag, the first food smell, the first “Can I get you anything from downstairs?” Vera’s gone, outracing any malevolent spirits to the elevator.
The elevator’s so crowded Vera considers waving it on, except for the look she’d get from Hazel. Being jammed in like that feels both repellent and erotic. It makes her want to find some Himalayan cave and never see anyone again; it makes her want to strip naked and rub against all that sweet, sticky human flesh.
The lobby seems chokingly hot, then like a cool memory compared to Sixth Avenue. It’s the kind of heat that feels like wearing a cast-iron pot on your head: inside, brain cells explode like popcorn. Vera has no idea where she’s going. The crowd engulfs her, then casts her up like driftwood, slamming her into a bin of tube socks and shower sandals and discount-store washcloths. Stunned, Vera stares at the rainbow-colored Afro wigs bunched over the doorway like exotic, fuzzy coconuts. She tries to imagine wearing one into Frank Shaefer’s office for the post-lunch showdown. Once Louise went to a Halloween party dressed as garbage, with a milk carton pinned to her T-shirt, orange peels and shredded plastic wrap in her hair; at the party she opened a toy garbage can and dumped paper on the rug. The silence, the guests’ blank faces—it’s how Vera pictures Frank and Dan’s reaction to her in a rainbow Afro wig.
She’s thinking of the winter Lowell scratched his cornea and so complained about people staring at his eyepatch that Vera bought him a grinning, pop-eyed Froggy the Gremlin mask. She was shocked when he seemed hurt by this new evidence of her hard-heartedness. If her heart were so hard, it wouldn’t have been broken by this sign of how far they’d come from the days when he’d have hung that frog mask by the door and never gone out without it. Even now the memory’s painful enough to make her just stop, causing a slight pedestrian pileup that leaves her directly in front of the New Napoli Restaurant.
Outside, a speaker’s playing a Muzak mariachi version of “South of the Border.” “Mission bells told me I shouldn’t stay…” Why not? Vera wonders, wishing she knew the rest of the song. Is it violence, or just faded love? Perhaps she’s confusing it with “El Paso” or
Touch of Evil
or countless lurid border stories that only a trashy
This Week
sensibility would care about in the first place. Still, she can’t help swaying slightly to those xylophone dips and glides.
In the window, Vinnie’s spinning pizza dough on his fists. He catches Vera’s eye, smiles, then looks away. Vinnie’s shy and handsome and such a flirt that sometimes Vera’s chest gets tight and it feels like the start of real love. Now she wonders if it’s possible to build a marriage on that: shy smiles and great pizza. Last year Vinnie’s pizza was written up in
New York
magazine, and for a while the place was crowded with upscale types. But the crowds moved on even before the blown-up magazine clipping came back from the printer. Mounted in plastic, gathering dust in the window, the clipping reminds Vera of a whole class of
This Week
stories, all variations on the theme of “too late”: Delayed letters arriving from GIs dead fifteen years, grieving mothers receiving hospital gift portraits of newborns who never made it home from neonatal intensive care.
Vera orders eggplant parmesan and a dark Heineken and brings them to her table. The eggplant is rich and generous with melted cheese; that and the ice-cold beer should make her feel better. But just to make sure they don’t, she takes Lowell’s letter from her purse. Rereading it till she knows it by heart, she’s trying—as she’s always done with Lowell—to read in something that just isn’t there.
The soundtrack has segued from “South of the Border” to “Tijuana Taxi.” Shutting it out, Vera thinks back to the time she went to San Francisco to visit Louise. Substituting Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
for Herb Alpert is all it takes to bring back those New Age wood-and-hanging-plant greasy spoons where she lunched with Louise’s tofu-brained friends, who would sooner have choked on their beansprouts than ask an uptight East Coast question like What do you do for a living? Unasked, Vera volunteered the fact she wrote other people’s stories. Other people’s stories? Really, they said. You’ve got to meet Lowell.
And where was Lowell? Off in some Bombay opium den, some Karachi hashish parlor, guiding some rich French junkie on a narcotics tour of Asia. While back at home, friends with barely enough energy to gum their guacamole jumped at the chance to tell his life story: how he was born to Arkansas Holy Rollers; how his father became a government engineer and was posted four hundred miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, to work on the DEW line; how he lived ten years in a log cabin with Mom and Dad and six kids and huskies and dogsleds, until his father was transferred down to Portland, where Lowell discovered his true calling, selling pot; how this vocation financed numerous trips to Asia, three spectacular hashish deals, and as many expensive failures. How those scrubbed vegetarian faces lit up when they listed the addictions Lowell had kicked, the substances he’d abused!
So even before she met him, Vera saw how Lowell’s friends loved him, how his story gave them not just the hope of new possibilities, last-minute changes, exceptions to the rule, but also the pure joy of telling it. The next part was predictable: She almost
had
to be disappointed by that big, long-faced hillbilly skulking around the edges of his own coming-home party.
Vera still likes remembering the interval when she convinced herself that her interest in Lowell was just friendly, that all she wanted was to spend time with him, to walk down the street or drive in a car and see what would happen and what he would do; followed by the period when every day she didn’t spend with him seemed wasted. The morning he showed up to see her at eight
A.M.
, and they knew what was going to happen, but the protocol of her staying on Louise’s living-room couch made them wait like courting teens all day. The strangeness of hearing that hillbilly accent in the darkness, telling her stories that permanently changed her idea of what stories she wanted to hear in the dark. The night he told her about a place in Afghanistan so backward they had no musical instruments but cupped their hands in their armpits and quacked out the rhythms and solos of the Nuristani Underarm Band. Even Vera knew how crazy it was to be falling in love with someone for telling glorified Afghan Polish jokes; and she knew that was what she was doing.
Meanwhile, the same people who’d told her Lowell’s life story now felt duty-bound to warn her: Lowell could go to Nuristan but not to the corner store. Send him out for a quart of milk and he’d come back with a plastic Aqua Man to wind up and swim in the tub. Yet it made perfect sense that the bazaars of Mazār-i-Sharif would spoil you for the Safeway, and Vera thanked God for sending her someone who could find the magic in the Seven-Eleven.
By then they’d rented a room in some art student’s Hayes Street flat and were living on love with a food-stamp backup. Then winter came, bringing week after week of rain. One wet morning Lowell rolled up his last antique Bokhara rug and came back hours later with no rug and two plane tickets to Mérida, where, he said, they’d eat enough psilocybin mushrooms to put them in touch with ancient Mayans who’d lead them to their lost buried treasure. Soon after, Vera found herself in a cow pasture in Palenque, watching some Quebecois hippies cook psychedelic-mushroom omelets, and soon after that on her knees in a tunnel under the pyramids, burrowing through the darkness lit only by bunches of sputtering wax
cerillos.
Her sharpest memory is of sitting by a
cenote
with Lowell complaining nonstop about the team of crack divers from
National Geographic
who’d got there first and dredged up a fortune in gold. How soothing it was to picture
National Geographic
’s sunny yellow borders instead of that dismal black pool, those thousands of gilded Mayan virgins sinking like stones!
So what? said Lowell. What good did all that treasure do the Mayans? They’d go to the coast and skindive for the Giant Squid and bring him back to exhibit in New York. But all Vera got skindiving was rapture of the deep before she’d even left the surface and a blistering sunburn on her back.
By this time their money was almost gone. They had twenty pesos total when Vera asked Lowell to buy some cocoa butter or vaseline, some homeopathic Mayan sunburn remedy—anything to ease the rawness aggravated by the rough rope hammock they were sleeping on in their poverty-level hippie shack on the beach. Hours later Lowell returned with a small bag of cashew nuts, its fifteen-peso price tag still attached. He was bewildered when she hid her face in her hands and cried. He’d bought the cashews as a present to take her mind off her sunburn. By then Vera was starting to suspect that all those addictions Lowell had kicked had taken their cerebral toll. The miles those cashews had traveled from Ceylon to Mexico seemed suddenly like an infinitesimal fraction of the distance between her and Lowell.
By the time Louise sent money, Vera and Lowell weren’t speaking any more than it took to arrange some vague plan to fly back to New York and try to work things out. Vera’s secret plan, which made her feel like one of those Mafia widows who marry their husband’s killer and wait twenty years for their middle-of-the-night revenge, was to try working things out without Lowell. But when their plane ran into a storm—two very long hours of freefall plunges and dead silence except for the clicking of rosaries—Lowell put his hand over Vera’s and told her stories of Royal Burmese Airways: how when the planes turn around for takeoff, the passengers pile out onto the runway and push; how a lady beside him found a chilled, semiconscious scorpion in her plastic-wrapped dinner tray. He’d just begun telling her how the Burmese pilots turn the signal lights out at night to save fuel when their plane limped into Kennedy and they looked at each other and knew that their love and bravery had brought them in for a landing.
Peter Pan and Wendy, they flew hand in hand through baggage claim, customs, straight to the marriage-license bureau. By the weekend, they’d already found an apartment and conceived Rosalie. Lowell got a Christmas-rush job on the Gimbels loading dock. Vera went to work for the
Downtowner
, cutting self-help articles to fit snugly around the ads. Rosie was born. They fell in love with her and briefly again with each other. Then Vera went back to work while Lowell took care of the baby and started a screenplay that, she realizes now, was his domestic version of digging for Mayan treasure; the script, she vaguely remembers, was a kind of Preston Sturges comedy involving the Annual Tannana Ice Derby, when all Alaska bets on the minute and second the ice in the Tannana River will crack.
She can almost graph those weeks: up on Wednesdays when Lowell bought his New York State Lottery ticket, down on Tuesdays when the winning numbers came out. She can almost smell the spoiled-milk odor of the Ninth Street Market Stop with its astronomical prices, its aisles narrow as arteries, clogged with old ladies stalled by the cranberry juice, its power to make you imagine it after closing, rats scrabbling over the cheddar cheese in the pale half-light of the dairy bin. She sees a procession of brown paper bags marching toward her like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s brooms, most filled with awful things that Lowell had bought and she wouldn’t touch with a stick: sauerkraut in salami-shaped packages, rainbow-hued breakfast cereals, meat in brine with fat globules waving like sea anemones, and cornflakes, always cornflakes, the dropped-from-the-sky-by-helicopter manna of Lowell’s Alaskan childhood. And still she kept sending him out, kept testing him. Because no matter how often it happened, it never seemed possible that he would really spend the money for Rosie’s diapers on some new brand of rolled anchovy.