A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell

BOOK: A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell
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A Woman Named Drown

Padgett Powell
1987

For Sidney
and
Amanda Dahl,
two
tough girls


    
S
ix
months ago a friend of mine and I left doctoral programs in chemistry
under certain different circumstances. Tom, a true scientist, got a
letter at Oak Ridge, where he was finishing up his degree, informing
him he had a job for the taking in Alabama--a high-level, nuclear
police-chaperon affair, to judge from what he gleefully told me. I,
scientist by default, by process of elimination, got a letter from my
girlfriend in Norway letting me know in the subtlest, happiest way
imaginable that I would not be joining her there as we had planned
upon completion of my degree. When you are told that your fiancée, a
promising post-doc to an internationally famous crystallographer
expatriated from Brooklyn, finds that sagacious mentor "a cute
little guy (only five three! )" who "eats eggs on his
hamburgers!" --you can read all the handwriting on the wall you
ever need to read. I called her up, twice (once, as the rhyme puts
it, for the money--$300; and once for the show--a considerable
theater of her releasing, in a two-hour transatlantic tear burst,
from the gunny sack of our entire six years off-and-on together,
every crime of impassion I committed, and these transgressions I
admit were endless, ranging from birthdays forgotten to old lovers
not forgotten), and got a picture, as you can only on a telephone
costing you a month's stipend, of her veritable sainthood for having
put up for so long with the entire sham she convinced me I was, and
was certain, as I reluctantly hung up the second time, that I had
lost the finest, purest girl ever there would be for me. The starch
in my doctorate will, which had not been much to begin with,
vanished.

I trudged around the lab more bowlegged or
splay-footed toward purpose than usual for about two weeks, when I
got a card from Tom in Alabama. Tom is the sort of natural scientist
who can learn, say, Schrodinger, while penciling Walt Disney
characters in the margins and Hlling their balloons with the
integrals and derivatives required on the following day's
examination, and the first thing I saw on the card was a Goofyesque
figure clearly representing Tom holding a Geiger counter to the rear
end of an armadillo. Around the card this same figure pursued
armadillos in odd attitudes and circumstances.

With a magnifying g1ass--Tom can put he claims, four
thousand words on a postcard--I made out this:

Remember Elaine? (Good girl.) 1 married
her. Sold tent. Sold Mustang. It was a good car. Goofytom is doing
what he does. Did you know armadillo feces register most accurately
low-level hot traces around reactors? Me neither. P.U. Have my own
desk. Partially stuffed mouse in drawer, lower left. Story behind
that. Cotton sticking from his eyes makes him look like a ghoul
mouse.
A badge and some ID papers have been
found belonging to a certain . . . no! yes! . . . Fenster Ludge.
Colleagues plenty Silkwood-worried.

The ghoul mouse refers obliquely to one of our
maturer pastimes together before he moved to Oak Ridge ( I stayed in
Knoxville). We shot rats in our apartments with his slingshot. They
(the apartments) were owned by the same notorious slumlord, and we
found this competitive exercise preferable to registering formal
complaints about the infestation. Neither of us wanted the rents to
go up, either--Tom for true want and I for false (I was, still am,
for that matter, abjuring some more or less family money, of which I
am supposed to lay claim to plenty, but that is a longer story). The
tent he mentions is one of two army field hospitals we bought for
twenty dollars apiece and wadded cumbrously into our respective rat
squats, providing thereby our rats with rich, paraffiny tunnels to
hide in and our firing ranges with good, solid, gratifying backstops.
It was almost as good to get a loud canvas pop as it was to get a
rat.

Tom created Fenster Ludge when he discovered that one
carrel in a suite of eight was empty. He made out a nameplate for the
empty space, provided Fenster with some of his own books and
supplies, and then began to ask his six new colleagues in the suite
if anyone had seen "this Fenster Ludge guy." No one had. I
caught Tom unable to contain a giggle one day during a discussion of
the Fenster Ludge guy, why no one had seen him, etc. Someone finally
claimed to have spotted a fellow fitting the presumed description of
a man who might be called Fenster Ludge. And now he has taken Fenster
to the sinister zones of nuclear cover-ups.

This card brought me somehow full circle to the
Norway letter of two weeks before, and without feeling too bad about
that per se (I don't think), I did feel bad, wasted. I sat for a bit
and then did a significant thing without needing to analyze its
merits, without needing to run the customary assay upon its
advisability and consequences, short term and long, and
self-actualization costs. I quit chemistry. I put Tom's card down on
a heavy slate table and walked into Dr. Friedeman's office and said,
I quit. Doctoral resignation is not standardly done--I have seen men
thrown from offices, one nearly hurled from a balcony--but Friedeman
took it like the godly sufferer that he is.

"
Son," he said, standing up and taking me
by the shoulder, "when the fire for inorgany that is in your
heart reignites, come back. There'll be a place in the sun for you."
I chuckled at this, and Friedeman did, too. We shook hands.

Friedeman was a card, and probably the one good
scientist in the country with sufficient crazed grace to accept for
long a dilettante like me. He was, on the side, a lay Baptist
preacher, all disappointment to him a designed trial from Cod, so in
a way I could hardly have presumed to have disappointed him. Try as I
did, I could not imagine him delivering low religion, for his science
is virtually high Anglican if not Catholic in its reach and style. He
was capable of saying, "We know full well in our hearts that
this bond is not less than three angstroms," and this faith
could well be responsible for three years of failing, dogged
experimentation to prove the improbable. For proving the improbable,
and for thereby discovering the unknown, he is regarded a dean of
inorganic chemistry the world over, yet he walks around his lab
blessing beakers known to have contained winning results, pocketing
lucky magnetic stir bars.

We shook hands, and I
almost doubted myself, but kept going, kept quitting, quit. I walked
out into the bright afternoon feeling truly released, as if out of
the army or prison, and felt this relief most oddly for not having
known before it any real oppression. I do not yet know the components
of the feeling, a kind of deep-breath, first-of-spring freshness.

* * *

I met two women in the Smokies one night who told me
they had been elementary-school teachers and quit, secretaries and
quit, and presently they were stewardesses and thinking of quitting
that. I remarked that they seemed to do a bit of quitting and one of
them snapped, "You have to start before you can quit."

I stood there on the bright catwalk wondering what
I'd started, and why, and why I felt so very frisky. What I'd
started, as near as I can tell now, is a kind of fit of starts
governed by nothing except a distaste for plans. For a casual,
relaxed fellow with, as I have confessed, a bit of money in the
closet, I suddenly came to realize I had a network of plans about me
as stifling as the web of ambition any good young law student or
medical student has, and I completely did not recognize the need for
it. This money: no big deal; the old man would like for his
drilling-supply business to remain in the family and that is me and
that is about a two-million-dollar net thing and it had not
particularly appealed to me yet. I had been occupied, I suppose, with
a kind of disguised rich boy's finding himself before assuming the
obligation of the family fortune, and I had been doing it as
correctly, I thought, as I could (that is, by not using any of the
money, by doing nothing to endanger its source, by "applying"
myself in some uphill and admirable endeavor the meanwhile, if
science still can be said to be uphill and admirable). It must have
occurred to me during the transatlantic jilt and upon discovering
Tom's little predicament that I was doing not much really at all in
the way of finding myself, which phrase I do not relish; and I was
not doing much, anything, in the way of having fun. Rich boys
ignoring their money ought to have fun.

So what I started that day was apparently a series of
impulses which qualified for my interest if I could detect no point
in them at all. I got a job sewing giant tents, learned to box, moved
in with a woman who's a sometime amateur actress.

My training in science was not wasted: I can smell
plans where there are none and so avoid them. In any good lab you
look down about a two-year tunnel of programmed proving every rare
day that you could possibly be said to begin anything, and even the
chance that you will not prove what you hope to prove is planned for,
accommodatable by an existing plan for happy accidents. And my
training supplies me this: I sit every morning now recording these
planless times, taking these notes with a near-Ph.D.'s mechanical
care. I have a last blue-gridded notebook and I sit at a wire-mesh
patio table and try to effect some shape, some contour, from these
raw data of the wasty wonderful days since I quit. I quit the tent
sewing and the boxing. I started the actress-living-with. I quit my
room--gave away everything in it. I started these notes.

    
B
efore
I got to this major starting and quitting I did some warm-up starting
and quitting. I started going to revivals and quit, I started to
seduce the Orphan and quit, I talked for the very last time to the
Veteran, during which time I decided to quit making fun of him. I did
all this the night after quitting Friedeman, and some of it is not
inexplicable. The data point of the spontaneous taking in of a tent
revival, for example, has to do with getting home and breathing the
waxy air of my field hospital and wondering about Friedeman's
preaching, and seeing my cute deco dimestore-framed portrait of Miss
Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski looking sexier and smarter and
righter than ever, and needing something to do other than make a
third phone call. Before I could get going to the revival, the
Veteran started yelling at his dead nigger.

He was stomping around hard in his steel-soled jungle
boots, presumably trying to shake the dead nigger out of hiding. This
was customary. As was not customary, I went over to have a look. I
usually waited until he came to my room (next to his) to ask me if
I'd seen the dead nigger.

Before I could knock, he jerked open his door.

"
What!" he said.

"
I'm here to help you catch him."

"
You've been in my
house
?"

"
No, man. No way, man. I've been listening? This
was a somewhat standard exchange for us, a kind of password ritual.

"
Catch who, then?" (This was also: my
answer would help corroborate the existence of the prowling dead
nigger.)

"
The dead nigger."

"
Dead nigger is
right
,"
he shouted, turning and marching into his room, gesturing wildly, his
arms swinging with violence and surrender at once. "Every time I
leave, dead fucking nigger pisses all over the place."

BOOK: A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell
7.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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