They were talking over forty minutes, and nothing of substance had been said. Her ear had a slight ache. She said, in a vexing way, just to suddenly know, ‘This widow, does she have a name?’
The widow’s name was Jessie — Jessie Farmer. Peter elaborated. She was decidedly younger than her husband had been and marked by an indefatigable spirit of the early pioneers. She had left home at fifteen. He described her as a spirit akin to Annie Oakley.
Joanne sensed the imaginative reach of the desperate. She was turned to the TV, her mind already distracted in the cleaving awareness that they were done. None of it was true, but she had brooked a dam of emotion in Peter. It was her obligation to stand in the deluge of regret.
Poltergeist was on auto-replay, rolling through the credits, and had been for close on five minutes. It was a great wonder how a movie was ever made, how each found their calling. She meant to look up what exactly was a Key Grip or a Best Boy.
Peter was still talking about Jessie Farmer, how she had come from a long line of ancestors drawn by the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and how she was sure there was whore in her some ways back. It was inevitable, men drunk on whiskey, men laid up in tubs of grimed water in advance of services rendered. It had been a quarrelsome business, those pioneer years, where there had been no long-term options and where each had survived by their wits and sense of fear and, in the West, how well they could handle a firearm. This was how the West was won and lost and won again. In his explanation there was a preternatural sense you could enter and understand another’s history better than your own. There was something good happening out in Oklahoma. Joanne believed it.
Joanne checked on Grace. She felt the far cast of men in her life at a great distance. She was alone but contained. Randolph roused. Joanne hushed him and went back into the long hallway. She was listening and not listening. There were, according to Peter, communities where Jessie came from out along the Pacific Northwest along the island chains, on Whidbey Island, who were preparing for the apocalypse and believed it was fast approaching.
Joanne had the insistent idea to bake something. She gathered ingredients in the kitchen, while Peter talked in what proved a yawning chasm of intersecting histories, Joanne understanding that the act of movement was essential to life, Peter describing further how Jessie Farmer met George Farmer going east, while passing through Oklahoma City’s Greyhound station. Jessie had stopped by the Federal Building, where Timothy McVeigh had killed all those people. George Farmer had been there and had handed Jessie a book of psalms, then asked her to pray with him for those lost. She had. George Farmer was in a black suit, like a scarecrow. His ankles showed over white socks. He was worth over two million dollars. Jessie learned it later. It didn’t change her.
Joanne said, ‘You should write all this down now, Peter, not to forget it.’
Peter didn’t get the underlying jab that she knew it was all made up. He was, he told her, lifting bales of hay in a regimen that started at five thirty, when the cock crowed. He was living the most salubrious life imaginable.
Of course, to verify any of it, Joanne might have asked simply to say hello to this Jessie Farmer, but she didn’t, because it was worth not knowing for sure. There would be, eventually, the break-up, the climax and bitter end of what had started with such promise.
It gave her an understanding of the sketched details he would pawn off on her if she called again. Instead, Joanne said in a quiet appeasement, ‘You make Oklahoma sound like it might be the answer to a great many troubles.’
Saying it stopped Peter cold, or Joanne felt it, her perceived gullibility emboldening within Peter a belief just then that he could conjure anything from make-believe.
He had determined, he told her with a rising truth, that you could scream at the top of your lungs and nobody would hear you for tens of miles, the snow on the plains, its blanketing monotony such that you could watch from a window, see the demarcation of the drive, and then the road, your escape to the outside world disappearing before your eyes in a matter of minutes.
This was suddenly the greater reality of his life. His voice was filled with a stark melancholy.
He began his poem again in earnest, fleeing from an apparent and glaring truth, so the poem was dead of whatever spark it ever contained. It was characteristic of Peter’s work and tied to his essential failing as an artist, his misconception that true genius was only ever uncovered in throwing up barriers to absolute happiness, when the opposite was most always true, and that, without a sense of openness, without love, all remained hidden behind words, or built around the fortress of poems.
Joanne said nothing. She rolled out her dough, used the depression of a cookie cutter shape to cut gingerbread men. She made a sad-faced gingerbread man, an effigy of Peter. She could almost transpose what was being said in her ear as something communicated by the gingerbread man. It made her smile, and then she thought, what might it be like to pull an arm off, one, and then the other, and the legs, too, anything to stop him?
The poem was so absolutely horrible. Were there in other professions, say in architecture, architects who couldn’t handle a protractor, or who didn’t know the basic elements of trigonometry?
What she thought of was the paunch of his belly, the way he used to advance with it between his legs. It was all a great confusion in her head, the alternative to Peter, the Robert Hoyts of the world, the self-aware, Hoyt making accommodation for a great and undeserved success that would be granted him, and, even before Robert Hoyt, the Daves of the world, those hypersexual Fonzies who would see the flare of high school notoriety pass them so quickly and who would eventually become the paranoid, hyper-religious, in their unironic Promise Keeper fidelity to Faith, Family, and Guns.
Joanne had read about them after her encounter with Dave, these Promise Keepers, who prayed before fucking, who went down on their knees and thanked God before they got a hard-on, praising Jesus through the act, and praying right after intercourse.
It seemed they were everywhere now, this fearful, vengeful stock, these reformists, those who wanted saving, so that even someone as preoccupied as Peter could not help but land upon a vague societal disaffection with his imaginary Jessie Farmer come inland from a white supremacist enclave on Whidbey Island.
Peter, she was sure, was tapping what he had witnessed in Upstate New York, Dave and Sheryl living with the confirmed belief that they were living through the last days in a world come undone by socialists, niggers and A-rabs, and that a legitimate alternative might be for Dave to pump a round of ammo into Sheryl, Misty, and the boys’ heads and then off himself with an abiding belief that life might resume under better conditions in the afterlife. It was an alternative reached by more people than anyone wanted to admit.
*
Joanne set the phone down eventually. What Peter said was not up for debate, speculation, or open to response, but a string of words spoken down the line and into the void where everything was a deep silence in the end.
Peter was still talking, and probably continued for a long time, when it didn’t rightly matter. Joanne balled the gingerbread man so he was without form. He was there if she needed, and that was enough to restore a strange confidence that all was not lost, not yet.