The Business of Naming Things (5 page)

C
LAIMER DID GO DOWN FOR THE VIGIL
. It was held right where the vote had been held, in the Communal Center. The mood was both festive and funereal; people milled about, the kids dressed in black, munching from cups of popcorn. There was a crudely painted banner hanging beneath the Aesthetic Democracy one, reading
RIVER
: 1970–1993.

The lights went down and everyone sat. No ceremony at all. On a large-screen TV, the FBI warning sat and stayed. “Hit fast forward,” said someone, and the image went into the fibrillation that meant it was speeding by. Whoever had the remote also raced through some coming attractions for movies no doubt already come and gone and now on video; Claimer recognized Emma Thompson, who was telling some
joke and flipping her hair and closing a door. And then a road scene and time seemed to stop: the film.

Several of the kids, and then more, chanted along with the voice-over narration. “I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know that I've been here before . . .”

What's this? thought Claimer. Ah, well. The sensation of profundity. So the kids are alright.

Claimer looked for his son and spotted him. In the front row, arm in arm in arm with about five other kids in a chain. No call for a father there. Kallie Ford was not in evidence. In fact, Claimer realized he might be the only bona fide adult left in the place, now that he looked around. Where had the others his own age gone to? His own age? My God, he thought, it's after midnight. And then sleep took him.

“I just want to kiss you, man.” A man's voice. Claimer was rubbing his eyes, awake. On the screen, two guys were sitting around a campfire. Later, his wife entered his twilight imagery as he drifted again. They had an argument. They were throwing plastic champagne glasses. Things escalated into passion. Clare was saying
glass
and
ass
as if there were some mystical linkage between them that suggested human linkages. They wrestled on the bed and then went still. Clare slowly worked the stem of the champagne glass up his ass. And she said, “There.” Claimer could see Kallie Ford in the corner of what had been his old office, her freckled face peeking out from behind a curtain.

Claimer woke up in the empty Communal Center. It was dark. He let himself out the side door and made his way to his unit. All the lights there were still on, but this son wasn't in his room, or anywhere. Claimer turned the lights out and headed for bed. It was 3:00
A.M.
He noticed a brightness out behind his place. He saw the roiling silver of a Jacuzzi, scarves
of white steam lifting into the dark. He'd not seen it before—a big redwood deck and a sloshing tub. They must have added it since he was last here, he realized. He saw a thin bare back at the far edge turn toward him. It was Kallie Ford. She held handfuls of smoking snow. She stood there in the churning water, rubbing up the length of her arms and across and down the declivities of her chest. The red ran off of her like blood.

Wolfsnow, thought Claimer, fondly for an old idea.

He watched for a long time. It was a transformation he could not credit or understand. Nor did he want to, somehow. It was enough just as it was.

He tried with his eyes to search the caul of darkness. He looked for his son to materialize, or for some “Henry” to appear. He could almost envision his own figure lurking at the lip of the Jacuzzi, admiring at closer range the luminous pearling of Kallie Ford's body. But he would not move.

In the end, he went to the kitchenette and made a cup of tea. He called his wife but hung up after two rings: he'd drawn a blank on her name.

S
UNLIGHT

I
T WAS A TERRIBLE
S
ATURDAY
, the kind of Saturday you have after a Friday night spent explaining to your third wife why you had a hooker in your house and how the condom wrapper she spotted under the couch was not, after all, even necessary. I promised said wife I would get some help. To mark my sincerity, I suggested we all go to a bookstore—wife, son, me. I'd start there. This earned her gruff consent.

I considered changing everything about the way I read, but my remorse ran deeper. I considered changing everything about the way I lived, loved, breathed, and ate as well. I was in that not smoking, not drinking, resume going to Mass place, maybe learn a foreign language and spend a decade reading Dickens place. I would live forever in family. I was in the poorhouse of want and shame, which dogs often call home. It's where I belonged.

In the poetry section, I picked up an anthology edited by Robert Bly—he couldn't have been more disdainful of the kind of work I had loved; I'd always returned the favor. He wanted “story,” “emotion,” “power,” and “love.” He wanted language treated as sacred, not something to be torn, shorn, and stripped naked. That's it! That's what I wanted to hear now. Next to Bly was an old favorite—Charles Bernstein, founding Language poet, colleague, friend. On the back of his book,
this: “Bernstein's allegiance has not been to any one kind of poetry, but to an ‘artificed' writing that refused simple absorption into the society around it.” Why would I be interested in that?
Refusing
society? What had that done for me? What was I doing? I took the Bly and dropped Charles back in his slot.

I moved to the self-help section. I stood there in the brightly lit area (it seemed more brightly lit than the poetry section—is that possible?). I found the adoption books, most of them on how to adopt. Or how to search. Being adopted was the source of my problems, I'd grimly announced. My wife approved this line of inquiry. I was on it.

I spotted Betty Jean Lifton's spread of titles on the adoption experience. I opened one of them and found a brief section headed “Literature” toward the back. It dealt solely with the writer Harold Brodkey—“an adoptee who is not involved in the adoption movement.” Adoption movement? I decided to leave that part for another time.

Lifton offered up Brodkey as a victim of what she called “the adoption syndrome,” and his prose as symptomatic of an adoptee's unwhole self. Brodkey had told her that he “used adoption as a form of freedom—it separates you from the norm.”

“Brodkey is all adoptees writ large,” she concluded. Adoption, freedom, writing. I leafed inside for more:

“Orphans child heroes—Oedipus, Moses, Sargon, Romulus, Remus and Superman . . . pretended to be real persons in everyday relationships and then disappeared on secret exploits that they shared with no one
.

Unless caught.

“Adoptees
,
then, live with a dual sense of reality, wanted and unwanted, superchild and monsterchild, immortal and mortal. . . . One part is chosen, the other abandoned.”

And left on the carpet.

“Adoptee fantasies . . . are an attempt to repair one's broken narrative, to dream it along. They enable the child to stay magically connected with the lost birth mother.”

Her name was Cinnamon, she said.

I underlined the words
broken narrative
so hard, I tore through the page: everything I did not know captured in two words—and now it's the only thing I know.

I took the Lifton book, returned the Bly to his slot, picked up the Bernstein again, put it back again, and read in a chair till the rest of the family had made their choices. I had made mine: Lifton, with a promise to find Brodkey.

“A
N ACCIDENTAL GLORY
.” These three words end the first thing I ever read by Harold Brodkey, a story of his called “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” long ago. The story appeared in an issue of the
New American Review
, edited by Ted Solotaroff. Long ago was around 1979 or '80, after
NAR
had become defunct, and its slim teal-colored volumes, each bound like a mass-market paperback, could be found in used-book bins all over the city. They made for bargain reading. I was young and new to New York City and its literary culture. I was making $117 a week as a copyeditor for the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers on East Forty-seventh Street.

By the time I arrived at these three words—sitting alone in my fourth-floor walk-up on East Eighty-first Street—I was in tears, breathing hard. That's what I remembered of Harold Brodkey.

“His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” is about one thing—a son being carried by a father, into and out of sunlight. That's it. In about seven thousand words, you go from “I am being lifted into the air” to the ending, where the sunlight is so
bright in the child's eyes that he turns his head inward, toward the heat of his father's neck, and then notices his father's face, “unprotected from the luminousness all around us . . . caught in that light. In an accidental glory.”

That passed for love, in Brodkey. It passed for love with me—a tableau, of some relation, in a wider, alien, luminousness, where nothing is fated, nothing is assured; where everything's an accident, but nonetheless glorious.

I was particularly vulnerable to that kind of thing at that time: My little boy, from my first marriage, not yet two years old, and his mother, after trying to live with me, had decamped for Indiana, where she was from and where we had met three years earlier. Together, she and I had endured a romantic collision at the end of my senior year of college, gotten married at an outdoor hippie/Chicano civil ceremony that August, complete with roasted pig, Mexican rock band (Los Impactos), and plenty of psilocybin; we'd braved a year in Leeds, England, as I worked toward a master's degree; survived my parents' disapproval of our marriage and then enjoyed their blessing when my son was born; but we couldn't handle eighteen months of being poor and unaccomplished and kid-burdened, and we came apart. Though one part of me was giddy with the freedom of being single again and not strapped by nightly, suffocating family affairs and grinding domestic chaos, I missed my little boy.

I might have seen Brodkey not long after. I was sitting in my local Irish bar, where I stretched out five dollars nearly every night into eight or nine mugs of draft beer with a dollar's tip, mourning my losses by forgetting them. A man wearing the face I'd seen pictured in a copy of
Esquire
, with the long, solid, beveled head and accusing eyes, came through the door, his cashmere coat swinging from his broad shoulders like the cape
of a warrior, a garment he seemed to expect someone would relieve him of, so that then he could fire off a few quick combinations like a fighter, or, presto, produce a handkerchief from a sleeve and release a dove. An elegant woman with a cap of short silvery hair followed in his wake, looking bemused. She did not remove his coat and they did not stay for a drink, as I had hoped. Harold bulled his way to the bar and asked—a bit imperiously of Leo, the barman, I thought—directions to some place he was clearly not in. Snow melted and winked out on the wool of his topcoat. I thought of saying something about his story or something clever in the literary-gossip category—“What's up with Joseph Heller? I read it.
Nothing
happened!”—but I was in my cups, so I swallowed it. Through the bar's large window I could see the two of them on Second Avenue, looking north. Harold donned a hat I had not seen—a fedora; he snapped the brim as if setting a course, put his arm around his lady, and together they sailed forth.

That was the last I thought of Harold Brodkey for the next sixteen or seventeen years, during which time I built a career in publishing, wrote a few books, married again, and then again; cycled out of New York for brief stints—for a small literary press in Dutchess County, for the editorship of a magazine about small literary presses, in Connecticut—and generally filled my reading with writers who were not Harold Brodkey. I could hardly be faulted for abandoning Harold: During this time, if he was known at all, it was for
not
publishing. Something about a long-promised novel, announced more than once in publisher catalogs, had continually failed to appear, its nonexistence moving from house to house, looking for a home that would have it, for a house that would wait for its author to finish, pronounce it done. When it did come, the reviews were dismissive
: The Runaway Soul
. I did not read it.

Could I be faulted for abandoning my young son? He was now a teenager; he lived in Indiana. He had two younger half brothers. I saw them all at his mother's funeral—my first wife's funeral. She died brutally of hypothermia, alone, drunk, in a cold January rain. Could I be faulted for having moved on, to other marriages, now my third, with a new son? These questions hadn't vexed me much, but they would. And they turned me back to Harold Brodkey—with an assist from that small tear of condom-wrapper foil, detritus from a drunken night alone in the city when the family was away.