What the fuck did you have on Bran Winslow to turn him into your Uncle Tom? Your Stepin Fetchit? Your coolie laborer? Second sax in your brass section? Make-work creative typist?
Oh, Jesus, Jimmy, this is most hateful; and I don’t even know what was behind it.
Poor Bran.
Damn! Stop that! Stop thinking that way. There was a reason, a solid, good reason. There had to be. No writer can do that to another writer who knows how good he is, who has the books in him crying out to be released. No one. No damn you, no one!
My head was swimming. I felt sick to my stomach.
“Can you hold the tape,” I heard myself saying; and then as the film vanished and white screen appeared, I bolted out of my chair and rushed for the toilet.
That dyspeptic old fart Nelson Algren got three out of four. He wrote: “Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never eat in a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
Close. Very close.
But he missed a fourth:
“Never let anyone catch you down on your knees puking into a toilet bowl.”
Especially not a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
I should have locked the door. But the bile was pushing as if it were spring-loaded; I barely had time to get into the can before I felt it coming like the Sunshine Express. Down on my knees, loving the toilet bowl, and then the river of fire.
Leslie was in there, right behind me, trying to hold my forehead, for Christ’s consumptive sake, with me hurling and heaving like a boa constrictor that’s swallowed a Peterbilt. I shoved at her, ineffectually, as she continued to play Lady Bountiful to my bounty.
I flailed my free arm behind me, trying to get her to back off. I think in that moment I realized just how insensitive she is. There’d always been hints… such as her revelation at a group dinner many years before that she had, as a child, thrown a hamster into a window fan… and then, of course, she’d stayed married to Jimmy; that had to indicate more than a soupçon of the obdurate.
But the level of insensitivity it takes to force someone in the most degrading condition known to humanity to think that he’s being watched while he glops up his guts, no matter if it’s misguidedly interpreted as “concern” or “out of love,” is a bestial level whereon one finds only flagstones or spent shell casings. Back off!
After a while I got up, filled the sink with cold water, put my face into it completely, and lay there for quite a length pf time, allowing the spittle and other nastiness to float away on the tide. My eyes were burning. I could not, thank God, see my face in the water.
I emptied the bowl, washed thoroughly, gargled as best I could with icy water, and reached for a towel. Leslie was standing there with one in her outstretched hand.
I took it. “Thank you very much.”
“How do you feel?”
“Dandy. Just dandy.”
“That was awful.”
I looked a surprised look. “Oh, really? It usually brings down the house. The awestruck expressions of the crowd are usually upon me.” Back the fuck off!
“My God,” she said, “you know you’re even starting to talk like him?”
Have you never perceived that before, my love? Have you never caught on that my interior monologues are never in my own voice, never the way I write or speak? They are pure Jimmy. That quick-silver turn of the phrase, all that heat and color; not the plodding, methodical, reasonably reasoned wise uncle with good, solid thinking of Laurence Bedloe, but rather the bold, sure spring of the tiger, and I believe in you. Never caught that, eh? How sad, how sorry: if I were to write up the relationship between the Recently Departed and Larry Bedloe it would be in the assumed voice of Kerch Jimmy. You didn’t pick up on that? You’re simply not paying attention.
“The hamster isn’t the most awful I’ve ever heard,” I said, “although it is in the top tenth of a percentile of the most awful.”
“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”
“The most awful, I guess, was something Missy told me. She said that when she was a kid Down South they used to take baby ducks and chicks, and they’d bury them up to their no-necks in the dirt, and then they’d run the lawn mower over them. Now that is yucchh.”
Her face was all pulled out of shape. “I’m calling the doctor.”
There was a set of silver-backed military brushes on the counter. I picked them up and started brushing back my wet hair. I looked at her in the mirror and said, “Very good idea. You call the doctor. Make it a voodoo doctor, if you can get Inboard to clear a line to Haiti. Get a specialist in resurrection. Tell him we’re not sure Jimmy is completely all the way dead… that he seems to be clinging ferociously to life… your life, my life, Bran’s life…”
She started to cry. I put the brushes down and turned to her; but I didn’t take her in my arms, usually pro forma. I just stared at her. She had the heels of her hands in her eyes and she was starting to get into it.
“Come on, Leslie! Pack it in, darlin’!”
She fell against me, put her arms around me.
“Then,” I said, “he pushed her away.” And I pushed her away.
She looked at me. She said, “What?”
“He stared back at her,” I said, “and said simply, ‘We don’t walk backward, do we? You’re his wife; you’ll always be his wife, even if you remarry, even if you’re canonized; he owns you. You say no, but five years from now you’ll make a deal with Simon & Schuster and have poor Bran out there ghostwrite your memoirs—IWas Kercher’s Koncubine. ‘ And he shook his head sadly,” I said, “and he walked to the door and walked out.” And then I walked past her to the door and walked out.
Not so hard ghostwriting in the voice of a ghost.
They all looked at me as I reentered the library. I patted the Abominable Snowman on the belly and resumed my appointed seat, ready to let Jimmy have another go at me. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails would have been a happier prospect.
They were still looking at me as Leslie came in. “Something I ate, perhaps. An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of underdone potato. More of gravy than of grave. Do let’s continue with the show.” All but Leslie continued to stare at me, touched by astonishment. Ah, of what good are literary allusions in the Land of Functional Illiterates, close to the borders of the Kingdom of the Blind?
But we continued.
The videotape began playing again, and once” again we were in this library, weeks ago, only a moment after Bran had identified Jimmy as Jimmy and caused me to lose a perfectly lovely breakfast from DuPar’s Farmhouse. The tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize now spoke, as the camera came in on her.
“My name is Eusona Parker, and I have been Mr. Crowstairs’s housekeeper for eighteen, going on nineteen years; and that’s him sitting right there; and don’t nobody try to say he’s not in his sound mind and body ‘cause I have known him all these years and he’ s just as sharp and clean and neat as a pin as he’s ever been. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”
No wonder I didn’t recognize her. Eusona Parker had lost about eighty pounds.
Every Wednesday. That was Eusona’s day. I’d only seen her half a dozen times through the years, when I was in Los Angeles and visiting Jimmy. But if anyone knew his state of health, it was Ms. Parker. She had been more of a true mother to Jimmy than his own natural mother. What I remembered best about her was the “hearing aid.”