Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (16 page)

“Paul,” she said. “I'm so glad to hear from you. I was afraid you were never going to return my calls.”

“Yes,” I said, “well, I just need to request something from you.” It suddenly occurred to me that I shouldn't reveal my hand, that if she knew I were mounting Dad's defense, she might try to impede my research. “I'm wondering if I could get a copy of Dad's novel. I had one, but I guess I misplaced it. Anyway, it's just for—summer reading.”

“That's why you called?”

“Yes, that is why I called.”

There was a ruffle on her end, what sounded like a sigh or the receiver sliding against her shirt, then she said, with alarming force, “Sure, Paulie. I'll make a copy for you.”

“Wonderful. I'll be by tomorrow. I should be in Van Nuys around two or three.”

“I'm not at that house anymore. I told you that in one of my messages. There's just—too much there, too much horror, too much everything. I'm staying at Rory's now.”

I was proud of myself for not responding to her “horror” comment, just letting it slide for now. I had to be the calm one, the sane one. The next day, when I pulled up to Rory's Canoga Park apartment building (somehow I imagined Rory living in Venice Beach and was thoroughly disappointed), I kept repeating it to myself: Be calm, be sane.

I knocked on apartment 103 and Rory answered in flip-flops and toenail fungus. “Paulie, man, come in, come in.” He stepped sideways in the doorway to let me into the dark apartment. Considering how much people praise L.A.'s sunshine, it's strange how dim they keep their homes. This was one of those apartments that everyone in the
San Fernando Valley seemed to have, which sprung up during the second-wave suburb boom of the early sixties. The layouts are all the same, the walls all shiny and a little gummy from too many layers of cheap paint applied over decades of high tenant turnover. The only variable in these apartments is the refrigerator, renters usually having to supply their own, since landlords have grown weary of people skipping out on rent, people willing to sacrifice their security deposit in exchange for a cumbersome appliance. Rory had a nice one, decorated with what looked to be finger paintings; perhaps he also specialized in art therapy. Rory walked over to the kitchen table, which was covered with red plastic filing boxes, the tops tabbed and labeled (perhaps they'd gotten Julia's organizing lecture too). He grabbed a Kinko's box, handed it to me. “Here you go.” He seemed reticent, no longer the personable man I'd met at Jerry's Famous. I wanted him to ask me about my novel again, be interested in me.

“Is Edie here?” I asked.

He looked around, scratched his chin. Then in a low voice he said, “She was afraid to see you.” Behind Rory, the bedroom door was open a crack. I couldn't tell if there was a person in that crack or just a shadow. It suddenly closed. “She wanted to. But at the last minute, she panicked.” He sighed, crossed his arms over a billowy white T-shirt that said
Drop Pants Not Bombs
. “I hate to be the conduit here, but she's not sure what you think of her. I mean, you haven't returned any of her calls, or her letters. She had trouble reading you when you finally spoke on the phone yesterday. She's scared that you're angry. She's, well, she's scared of you.”

Be calm, be sane.

“She's going through a hard time right now and really needs your support. And the way you've been denying that support is really troubling to her, and me.”

Be calm, be sane.

“What?” he said. “Did you say Saddam Hussein?”

“No.” Be calm, be sane.

Just then the bedroom door swung open and Edie rushed into the living room. She was wearing one of her scarfy, Stevie Nicks shirts. Waving her arms around as she spoke she began to resemble one of those betta fish flaring at the sight of its mirror image. “No,” she was saying (to Rory or me it was unclear), “that's not true! Paulie”—she was looking, most definitely, at me now—“I wanted to speak to you, but he said I shouldn't.”

“Edie,” Rory said. “Breathe.”

“Why haven't you talked to me, Paulie? You finally come here and it's just to pick up that horrible book?” She was crying. “I've been trying—”

Rory was now in front of her, his hands on her shoulders, muttering calming things I couldn't quite make out.

“I've been trying—” Edie stopped and covered her face with her hands, inhaled slowly and steadily, seemingly beyond normal lung capacity. Rory and I watched her, wondering if she would start to inflate, float above us like a balloon at the Easter Day Parade. When she finally stopped inhaling, she held her breath for a suspenseful moment, then let it out in one big, barking exhale. She took her hands away from her face.

“I think what we need here,” Rory said, “is the talking stick.” He walked into the bedroom. Edie looked at me like she was taking aim.
I looked away, examined the crown molding. Rory came out of the bedroom holding two halves of a wooden staff. Judging from the fresh splinters, it looked like someone had recently cracked it over her knee. Rory held the sticks up to Edie, the splintery ends in her face. “Did you do this?”

“I figure with two sticks,” she said, “we can both talk.”

Rory was barely keeping his anger locked between clenched teeth. He stormed back into the bedroom, and I heard the sound of two short talking sticks thrown against the wall, then some frantic drawer openings and closings. He came back out, this time brandishing a large green flashlight. “This will have to suffice,” he said.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Edie said, crossing her arms and looking away.

“Fine,” Rory said. “You don't get the talking stick. Paul gets it first.” He shoved the flashlight at me.

With my father's book in one hand, I looked at the flashlight in the other, its ribbed, rubbery grip and convex lens.

“Come on,” Rory said. “Use it.”

Maybe this was my chance, after all, to tell Edie how wrong she was, to ask her why she'd do this to our father. But I couldn't come up with the words. Holding the flashlight, I remembered how Aunt Paige would tell us ghost stories, shining a flashlight under her face for a ghoulish effect. I turned it on.

“That's not what I meant by using it,” Rory said.

Aunt's Paige's ghost stories were always improvised and never very good. She always began with “It was a dark and stormy night” but would get derailed with the characters' genealogies and grooming
habits, and behind her back Edie would laugh mercilessly making fun of Paige's meandering brain.

I held the flashlight under my chin and said, “Remember, Edie? It was a dark and stormy night.” With the light shining obliquely into my eyes I couldn't see her reaction, but I didn't hear anything. I finally turned the light off and saw the two of them just staring at me.

“Paul,” Edie said, “what on earth are you doing?”

She'd clearly forgotten Aunt Paige's ghost stories, which baffled me. It was as if we'd taken so many of our collective memories and divided them up like assets we couldn't possibly have mutual claim to, as if our childhood had gone through probate.

I turned around and left.

I spent that night reading my father's novel straight through, ignoring the phone (Rory on the answering machine: “Hey, buddy. Listen, we're going to need that flashlight back. It's from our earthquake preparedness kit”), locked in the spare room that I'd converted into my home office just as my father had written the novel, over thirty years ago, locked in his home office. Here it was, another manuscript, unpublished just like mine, the imperfections visible on the page like scratches on film: The
A
's and
E
's on his typewriter had been worn down from use; you could tell because they occasionally looked double exposed, an effect you only get when you go over the same letter twice, which he probably did because the first time they looked hazy. I longed to feel the imprint of the letters on the page, as I had with his scripts, but the manuscript Rory had given me was not the original; it was a photocopy, which made for an almost prophylactic reading experience. Nonetheless, it was—and is—a powerful novel, and it only confirmed
for me my father's status as a great American writer. The prose style is effortless and transcendent—staccato in a way that I first took to be the influence of scriptwriting but I soon realized was an evocation of Hemingway—and I could feel the weight of the protagonist on the page, smell his whiskey-infused exhalations, hear his cracked voice. The title page just said
Untitled, a novel by George McWeeney, 8th draft, 1/30/1965
. It is still a little unclear to me whether the novel was actually
sans
title, or if this was some postmodern turn on my father's part. There is, after all, something profound and even chilling about titling this bildungs-/künstlerroman
Untitled
since the unnamed protagonist himself is in search of a meaningful existence, an identity—in search of a title, if you will. As much as I want to praise my father on this point, I must be careful, as I know how easy it can be for an eager reader to read too much into nothing. In college (the second half at UCLA, not the first half at COLA), I took a modern poetry class and had a powerful reading experience with T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
. At first, I found it all a bit confusing and felt overwhelmed and nervous that I wasn't smart enough to be at a real university, but I kept reading and had one of those
aha
moments teachers often talk about. The poem is broken into roman-numeraled sections, and I noticed that the fourth and shortest section, titled “Death by Water,” was, like the preceding section, labeled
III
rather than
IV
. It was an unsettling moment for me, sitting there on the sunny quad, realizing that in the moment Death appears in the poem, time effectively stops. Like a record skipping, time could not move forward, and section four was section three. I looked up at a midair Frisbee, saw the horrifying suspension of gravity, of time, and realized that Eliot had been right; we're all stuck in time.
I attacked that midterm paper with more energy than I had any before, because for the first time I'd experienced a poem as a wormhole connecting poet and reader, the fabric of space-time folding around for us to meet. Certainly Prof. Newton would read this and see my passion, my intelligence, my dedication to scholarly and literary pursuits, and he'd stop referring to me as “The Actor” for a few cheap laughs in class. But when he handed the paper back, I was devastated to see only one curt comment:
The numbering is a typo in the Penguin edition. That's why the syllabus says to get the Viking edition. C
-. And although I had to drop that class out of sheer humiliation, I perked up when I realized that even though my reading had been technically incorrect, my
experience
of reading had still been entirely genuine and therefore still—if not more—valid. Whether or not my father intended to title his novel
Untitled
, we will never know, but for the sake of clarity, I will refer to it here as
Untitled
.

After a few weeks of work, I had the new curriculum mapped out and ready to present to my classes. I knew which passages I would need to excerpt from Edie's manuscript, which passages I would need to excerpt from my father's, along with all of my independent research, articles, and book excerpts. I hauled a huge box of documents down to COLA's copy room in the dead of night. The copy room's eponymous machine is a wonder of modern technology. Sleek and large, with a computer screen and keypad, the Xerox IR5000S has half a dozen drawers for different kinds and sizes of paper, countless trays for the spitting-out of those papers after they've been appropriately plied with toner, and it collates and staples with a Teutonic efficiency that is truly terrifying. The size of a Yugoslavian automobile, it also projects an air
of authority that one rarely comes across at a school where even the most senior faculty members hunch timidly through the halls, always afraid that there will be no sections for them to teach next semester. I felt it necessary to do all my (admittedly) excessive photocopying under the cover of night because although we technically don't have a limit on how many photocopies we're allowed to make, some might have considered the number of reams I had to feed through it to be taking advantage, and as an adjunct I always have to be cognizant of how I appear around here. Plus, I felt the material here was of a sensitive nature, and did not want some colleague thumbing through a description of a bisected corpse and question my choice of curriculum. As I stood there, feeding pages and pages into the Xerox IR5000S, I felt like I was testing the machine's endurance, seeing if it had a breaking point. I was John Henry racing the steam engine. But the thing never jammed, never overheated. I was forced to admit my defeat. If I were reading a passage like this in a novel, I would scribble “Man v. Technology” in the margin and write a fucking fantastic term paper on it. Truth is, a lot of us at COLA have conflicted feelings about this machine. Ever since Reagan tried to shake down California education for money when he was governor, many community college districts—COLA's included—have been limiting tenure, relying more and more on part-time instructors. Over the years it got so bad that while they haven't technically abolished tenure, they don't grant it anymore, and now COLA is one of many community colleges in the state whose faculty is one hundred percent adjunct, all of us teaching without benefits, trying to make up for low pay by teaching so many sections we can't keep our students straight. The last tenured faculty member at COLA
retired a couple years ago. I remember seeing him walk around campus, his wavy white hair catching the sun, his tweed elbow-patches proudly earned. People would point him out the same way you'd point out a snow leopard in the wild. And yet, after decades of the district saying they can't afford to grant any of us full-time status, they somehow can afford to buy this beast of a machine and tell us we can make as many copies as we like. I tried to kill the machine that night, but I could not. I left with three boxes of paper, all perfectly collated and stapled, the pages hot like cookies straight from the oven, smelling like ionized ink.