His voice went back to normal. “Like what?”
I collected myself and tried to make my way back to important matters. “What about Lorraine?”
“What about her? We don’t owe anything to Lorraine.”
“So, you’re telling me to sell Mother’s house, move her into a home and kick Lorraine out into the street.”
“Basically.”
I hung up.
The phone rang the next morning while I sat at what had been my father’s desk staring at the gray box across the room. It was my agent.
credo quia absurdum est
“Sit down,” Yul said.
“I’m sitting,” I said, though I was standing and looking out the window at the street.
“I sent it over to Random House.”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t offer any qualifiers or anything.”
“Yes?”
“Six hundred thousand dollars.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said, sitting now.
“Paula Baderman, a senior editor over there, wants to meet Mr. Leigh.”
“Tell them he’s shy.” I was elated and ready to be angry. “Tell me what she said.”
“She called it true to life. Called it an important book.”
“What did she say about the writing?”
“She said it was magnificently raw and honest. She said it’s the kind of book that they will be reading in high schools thirty years from now.”
I said nothing.
“Monk?”
I looked out the window.
“Monk? This is what you wanted, right?”
“Random House.”
“Yep.”
“This is really fucked up, you know that.”
“You don’t want the deal.”
“Of course I want the deal,” I said. “Just tell them that Stagg Leigh is painfully, pathologically shy and that he’ll communicate with them through you.”
“I don’t know if that will cut it.”
“It’ll cut it.”
I never before felt so stranded. Alone in that house with Mother and Lorraine. But with the new bit of change I would be collecting for that awful little book, I could hire someone to come in and care for both of them. Perhaps for dramatic effect, I should have had to wait longer for my windfall, given my brother’s newfound flakiness and my sister’s debt (both what she owed and what I owed her), but it didn’t happen that way. The news of the money came and I breathed an ironic and bitter sigh of relief. Maybe I felt a bit of vindication somewhere inside me. Certainly, I felt a great deal of hostility toward an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.
“Monk?”
“Bill? What time is it? Jesus, Bill, it’s three in the morning.”
“Sorry, it’s only one here.”
“Is something wrong? Are you okay?”
“How long have you known I was gay?”
“Come on, Bill, it’s too early to talk about this. I mean, it’s too late. Too late in a couple of ways. You’re gay. Deal with it.”
“How long have you known?”
I sat up and switched on my bedside lamp. “I don’t know. For a while, I guess.”
“Did you know when I was in high school?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“I didn’t know then, but I must have been, right?”
“I don’t know how these things work. Are you all right?”
“Have you ever had any gay feelings?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You know that I love my children.”
“I know you do, Bill. Is there anything I can do?”
“Can you imagine if Father knew I was gay?”
“He wouldn’t take it well, that’s for sure.”
“How do you think Mother will take it?”
“I don’t know. Why tell her?”
“Why not tell her? Do you think I should be ashamed of what I am?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“Tell her if you want to. But first, she’s not going to understand what you are telling her and second, she’s going to forget two seconds after you’re done. So, tell her if you want to. It’s not going to make much difference to anybody but you.”
“So, you think I’m only concerned with myself.”
“I didn’t say that either. But, basically, that’s true of all of us.”
“I don’t need your platitudes.”
“Did you call looking for a fight?”
“No, I didn’t. I just thought I’d get a little more support from my little brother.”
“Support. You don’t need me to be gay. How’s your new—”
“Partner, it’s called a partner. Or boyfriend. You can say boyfriend. His name is Tad and he’s fine. I don’t know where he is right now, but he’s fine. Are you seeing anyone?”
“No.”
“Sell any books lately?”
“No. Listen, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Click.
Often humans will seek to improve the habitat of trout in a stream by providing some kind of structure under the water. People will sometimes dump anything in the stream, think that the fish will want to take shelter in it. Car bumpers, shopping carts, dog houses. Generally fish prefer the smooth curves of nature to the hard edges of humans. But more importantly, if the structure is not proper and is not put in the right place in the stream, the flow of the current might find an erodible bank and so cause more harm than good.
I walked in the morning, all the way to McPherson Square where I took the Metro to the mall. I walked around the National Gallery for a couple of hours, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria and imagined that I had a life. I contemplated also that suddenly I was slightly well off and that I really didn’t have to teach for a while. This was good, as I couldn’t bring myself to accept the slave wages over at American to teach a survey course to kids who didn’t care a hill of beans about Melville, Twain or Hurston.
Having come into what I considered a lot of money, I decided to go see something worth more than money. Granted, not all of it was worth more than money, in fact much of it was not worth the canvas or linen it was slathered upon, but some was and that was enough to put my new gain, rightly and sadly, into place. I thought of Cocteau and his saying that everything can be solved except being, this while staring at a Motherwell that both seduced and offended me. I stopped at a late Rothko, the feathery working of the brush, the dark colors, the white edges and I thought of death, my own death, my making my own death. I could not think like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that death was a thing of grandeur. Death was frighteningly as simple as life, instead of waking everyday and just doing it, one didn’t wake everyday and just did it. In the painting, whether the colors were there or not, I saw the cream of my mother’s skin and the brown of mine. My self-murder would not be an act of rage and despair, but of only despair and my artistic sensibility could not stand that. Throughout my teens and twenties I had killed myself many times, even made some of the preparations, stopping always at the writing of the note. I knew that I could manage nothing more that a perfunctory scribble and I didn’t want to see that, have my silly romantic notions shattered by a lack of imagination.
I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-à-vis my art. It was not exactly the case that I had sold out, but I was not, apparently, going to turn away the check. I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words. The wood was so simple. Damnit, a table was a table was a table.