Shatterday (25 page)

"And the bottom line is that you get zip.

"Not a cent.

"Not a penny.

"Not a farthing.

"Not a grubnik. (Which is worth 130 American.)

"Not even a Blue Chip Stamp.

"Nothing is what you get. Nada, nyet, nihil, nil, nihilum! Nothing, because if I have any dislike of women as a species it comes from you. Nothing because if I haven't been able, my whole life, entirely to trust a woman, it's because of what you ran on me when I was a kid.

"Sylvia, I don't think I've ever had a chance to tell you how deeply and thoroughly I loathe you. No, that isn't even correctly put. I loathed you for
most
of my life, but about twelve years ago I just sort of dropped you out of the universe. You ceased to exist. You were never there.

"I know you can't doubt that, because you were on the other end of the phone that time when—"

SylviaTheCunt screamed.

"Stop it!
Stop him right now
!"

Kenny Gross moved in from the shadowy rear of the library and cut off the Betamax. The screen went white. So did SylviaTheCunt. She was on her feet, the veins standing out in her forehead; a dumpy, big-bosomed woman in middle years. Jimmy always said she was one of those pathetic creatures that had been assembled by The Great Engineer in the Sky without a love mechanism in her. It didn't take a writer to see that. She had the look of old stone walls that had never even been considered for monuments or pyramids or standing circles.

"This is criminal!" she shouted. She clutched her purse to her stomach and kept hitting it with her fist. She wanted to strike out at something more offensive, but that was under dirt now. "I'll fight this! I will!"

Missy came around her chair. She towered over SylviaTheCunt and looked down at her, eyes blazing. It may not have been Jimmy reborn, but the spirit had floated out of the grave, off the silent screen, and had entered the body of his most stalwart defender. "You won't do
shit
, dolly. You
knew
what he had for you. You've always known. He hasn't
spoken
to you for twenty years till now. You'll fight? It is to laugh, dolly! He left the Corporation to me and I'll put ten fucking
thousand
attorneys on it. We'll block you and tie you up and make you look like the scumbag you are. Wanna fight, dolly? I'm waiting!"

It drained her. Bran came around and took her by the shoulders and took her back to her seat. Missy slumped down, murmuring, "That bitch … she hated him … she never thought he'd make it …" Bran whispered soft things close to her ear and she quieted down.

"For the record I'd suggest you watch the rest of the videotape, no matter how distasteful," Kenny Gross said to SylviaTheCunt. "In the event you do contemplate any legal action. Or if you prefer, you can wait in the living room and when the tape is finished I can run this section for you alone."

She stared at him with animosity. She looked around the room at the rest of us, her eyes like slag-heaps. Then she went back and resumed her seat.

Jimmy was really putting us through it. It reminded me of the piece he had written after his mother's funeral, where SylviaTheCunt had stood up right in the middle of the eulogy he had written and was reading, and had started screaming that Jimmy was defiling her mother's funeral. It had shattered Jimmy. He could almost have forgiven her anything she'd done to him as a kid, as a young man, as an adult: but not that. She was doing it again.

It was posthumous revenge, but it didn't ennoble Jimmy in the least. And it was hell for the rest of us.

The attorney started the tape again, and for the next twenty minutes Jimmy rang every change he could on the woman. How she had brutalized him as a child, with specific deeds that he had remembered with that quirky selective memory of his. Affronts and mean tricks that were almost ludicrous but which, if you remembered how susceptible you were as a little kid, were monstrously cruel. How she had fucked over her own kids, Jimmy's nephew and niece. How she had beaten down her husband, whom Jimmy had liked even though he wouldn't stand up to her. How she had become a deplorable human being—racist, bigoted, coarse, provincial and, for Jimmy the most inexcusable of all, bone-stick-stone stupid.

For twenty minutes we all averted our eyes as Jimmy got into it like a 'lude-stoked jazz musician trying to blow Bud Powell back from the Great Beyond. It was a bravura ugly performance, many riffs, a lot of high shrieking runs and a lot of low animal growls. None of us could look. There are beasts that go right in and suck the marrow, clean the bones to a glistening white.

But SylviaTheCunt looked.

With hard, mean eyes; straight tip at the screen; locked in eternal combat with the creature for whom she had seldom felt anything but the most destructive kind of sibling rivalry.

Jimmy once told me how he had gotten SylviaTheCunt to stop pulling his hair. He said one time when she grabbed a fistful of his straight, brown hair he had gritted his teeth and started turning his body in her grasp. Around and around until the hair pulled so tight the pain went all the way to the soles of his feet. It was so horrible, so excruciating, that she had been appalled at how painful it must have been … and she let him loose. And whenever she would try it again, he would inflict that pain on himself. Until she was so horrified by it that she stopped. "That's how I developed a very high threshold for pain," he had said.

I remember when he got done telling me that … I was gritting my teeth.

But finally, thank God finally, Jimmy had had all of it even he could handle. He had turned and turned till the pain was insupportable, even for him. Even my best friend, Jimmy, with that seemingly limitless capacity for revenge, for not just getting even, but for getting a bit more of the vigorish in shylock interest, even
he
had had all he could stomach. And not a moment too soon.

"You can stop it now," SylviaTheCunt said. And she stood up. The screen went white again, lights came on in the library where evening had descended, and Jimmy's sister looked around at all of us.

"You haven't heard the last of me," she said softly, and then she left.
You haven't heard the last of me.

But I had the sure feeling that we had; we had heard the last of her. Jimmy had called in all the debts from his childhood.

We sat down again, the lights went off, the Betamax went on, and Jimmy turned his head slightly to the left, looking straight at me in my chair. He had saved me for last and he said, "Larry, buddy? You out there?"

•

We were driving from Chicago to New Orleans in an attempt to make Mardi Gras, which we would miss by a full day, arriving on Ash Wednesday, because in the next five miles we would spin out across the snow-covered highway, escape being piledriven by an oncoming truck by inches, plunge off the side of the road, and bury the Corvette headfirst to its rear wheels in snowbanks fifteen feet deep. But we were still five miles away from missing Mardi Gras when he said the thing I remember most clearly from all the years that we knew each other.

He was driving. He said, "You know the one thing about me that I'm terrified anyone will ever find out. The one lie that makes all of my life a lie."

"I do?"

"Yep. You know it, but you don't know you know it."

"That makes no sense. If I knew it, then I'd know it."

"You know more about me than anyone else, and you have the data; but you don't know how much I fear it, how frightened I am that it might come out."

"I'll never tell."

"You might. Get pissed off at me sometime in the future; I might screw you; you might let it slip without knowing it."

"Never. I'll never tell a living soul; honest to God, you can trust me, Rocco: I'll take the filthy secret to my grave."

"No, it take it to my grave. But you might still tell it."

"If you're dead there'd be no way you could protect against that, is there?"

He thought about that for a while. This was before he married Leslie. We were good and close friends, whatever that meant. But he thought about it, seriously thought about this terrible thing I knew that he was ashamed of, the one thing in a life like his so filled with things any normal human being might find the cause of sleepless nights, that didn't bother him in the slightest way. He thought about the knowledge I possessed, this Damoclean sword I held over his life and his career and his work in which he revealed
everything
. Everything except the one bit of knowledge that made all of his life a lie.

And he said, "I'll have to figure out a way to keep you quiet after I'm dead."

"Good luck," I said, laughing lightly; and then we hit the icy patch and started to spin out.

•

He looked straight at me, having saved me for last.

"Larry, I herewith make you the executor of my literary estate. You have control of every novel, short story, essay, article, review, anthology and introduction I ever wrote. All those millions of words are in your care, buddy. You're the one they'll have to come to if they want to reprint even one of my commas."

I sat stunned. If he had done me the way he'd done SylviaTheCunt, taken this last chance to purge all the swamp animosity of a lifetime … or if he had done me the way he'd done Leslie, tried to clear his conscience of real or fancied harm he'd visited on her … if he'd done me as he'd done Missy and Bran, paid off for loyalty and friendship and domination of their lives … I wouldn't have been surprised.

But, oh you malicious wonderful sonofabitch! You did the one thing I cannot hear:
you tied me to you forever
.

Malicious? Probably not. It was just Jimmy insuring his memory. Going for posterity, and dragging me along with him, kicking and screaming every micromillimeter of the way. What a mind, what a fucking sweetly conniving mind. I couldn't even condemn him; hate him, yes, revile him, yes, rail at what he was doing, yes—against which I had no defense—but he was merely demonstrating as a perfect paradigm for his whole breakneck plunge of a life . . . the ugliness of simply being human.

I sat stunned. And the voice of the turtle was heard in the library: "Would you mind cutting it for a minute?"

Turtle, the voice was mine; stunned, I sat in the darkness. The sound of very old, rinkytink music played distantly in the empty concert hall of my head.

•

Jimmy had set me tip to be either his servant or his Griswold.

Poe. Jimmy got the idea from Poe.

He saw himself as Edgar Allan, cut off in his prime from the benefits of posterity's accolades; he saw me as the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, but a Griswold who was walled up himself, not free to blacken Poe's name, a Griswold never free of the sound of the tell-tale heart, Jimmy's heart, still beating, his will indomitable, his presence felt until the last moment of my own Griswold-trapped life.

We had talked of this. Poe was one of Jimmy's idols. He was more than an amusing storyteller to me. But Jimmy even had a puppet made of Edgar Allan, had it hanging in the living room as an ever-present reminder of what heights fantasy could reach.

And we had discussed what Griswold had done to Poe.

He had buried him for a hundred years.

What a poor judge of human nature Poe had been. What an ass. But let the critic Daniel Hoffman (Doubleday, 1972) tell it:

Most of all, [Poe's] own Imp of the Perverse so arranged the history of his career that his literary executor was his most invidious enemy, the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold. This man, an ex-minister, a busybody of letters, an incessant anthologist and publicizer, a failed poetaster fattening on the writings of others as does a moth eating Gobelin tapestries, went to extraordinary pains, after Poe's death, to present the deceased writer in a manner designed to make his name a household word for the dissolute, immoral, recklessly debauched. Griswold falsified the facts of Poe's life, and he revised the texts of Poe's letters, always with this calumnious end in view . . .

The scoundrel's punishment is this: he is now known everywhere, if known at all, as the maligner of a helpless genius; whereas had he done his job honestly, he'd have won his proper modest niche among the footnotes by which the nearly forgotten are saved from total oblivion.

How better to keep me quiet? What insanity! I didn't even know
which
of the many seamy facts of Jimmy's life was the one that so paralyzed him with fear of its disclosure! I wouldn't have talked about him; I wanted to be free of him. I simply wanted to be able to say, when asked, "Yeah, Kerch Crowstairs and I were close friends for over a quarter of a century; he'll be missed; his like will never come again"; the usual bullshit. That's
all
I wanted.

But the crazy paranoid sonofabitch couldn't even credit me with decent motivations
after
he was gone. My God, does fear have a life of its own, to keep feeding on the living after the carrier of the plague has gone down the hole?

•

"Okay, you can start it again," I said.

Kenny Gross ran it back and hit the
play
button. Jimmy was in the middle of what he'd been saying when my heart had begun to slam at me. "—if they want to reprint even one of my commas."

He looked so damned innocent up there.

Just chatting with his best friend; just asking his best chum buddy to take care of his memory.

"Larry, you know I'm not afraid of dying, Not that, and nothing else. Not spiders, snakes, being burned, being crippled, heights, closed-in places, ridicule, rejection … none of them ever got to me. Very high pain threshold, remember? But it's tomorrow that gets me, Larry. The day
after
you see this tape. Will they still read me? Will I be on the bookshelves, the Modern Library, matched sets in good bindings?
That's
what I'm afraid of, Larry Posterity. I want a chance to go on after I'm gone. Fifty years from now I want them to come back to my stuff, the way they did to Poe's, and Dickens's, and Conrad's. I don't want to wind up like Clark Ashton Smith or Cabell or the other Smith, Thorne Smith. I don't want bits and pieces of my unfinished stories written by the literary vampires. You've got to promise me, Larry: nobody will ever touch one of the fragments in my file. I probably won't know when I'm going to buy the farm, probably won't have time to get into the file with a blowtorch and crisp all the false starts and half-attempts. I've got them locked up, everything that's not finished, all in one file drawer in the office. Missy has the only other key. Get all that stuff out of there and burn it for me, buddy.