Boarded Windows (16 page)

“Eighteen sixty-seven,” Wade said. (Sixty-six, in fact.) We all stared at the reproduction awhile. The painting’s vantage is from the foot of the bed. A sheet covers part of the model’s left breast and all her head, most of which latter part would be above the painting’s top edge anyway, though if not for the sheet her neck and chin would probably be exposed. The sheet and the painting’s limiting focus keep the model’s arms out of view as well. It seemed odd to me that her right arm wasn’t even suggested, and the more I looked at the painting that afternoon (my memory now assisted by the several reproductions I have laid out in front of me
this
afternoon), the more the model seemed to be an amputee, partially unlimbed just as the bed is unlimned—it’s really not a bed at all but a kind of magic sheet floating in a dark brown inane, a dark brown nearly matching the model’s pubic hair.

“It’s just like a centerfold,” Maryanne said.

“Except a centerfold’s almost always a full-body shot,” I said.

“Well it may actually be a conflation of Courbet’s model—who was probably this gorgeous red-haired Irishwoman named Hiffernan—a conflation of her and one of the porno photos floating around Paris back then,” Wade said.

“It doesn’t seem like she has red hair,” I said, looking at the pubic hair.

“Yeah, but you have to remember that le réalisme wasn’t a fussbudget documentarian’s fidelity to prosaic reality but a prophet’s allegiance to essential truth,” Wade said.

“My dad has brown hair but a red beard,” Maryanne said.

“Besides, this is a bad reproduction,” Wade said, “though generational loss can of course be a source of great interest. Years ago—I never should have sold it—but years ago I owned the book that featured the first mass-repro of
L’origine du monde,
this wonderfully designed French book from the late sixties called
Le sexe de la femme
.”

I thought for a moment.

“It was by a doctor, maybe a friend of a Lacan’s, since Lacan owned
L’origine
for a long time—how perfect is that?—and maybe through him this doctor managed to get a photo, or it might have been that—”

“Wait,” I said.
“Le sexe de la femme
.”

Wade corrected my pronunciation.

“My mom owned that book too. She got it from a boyfriend when she was in Paris.”

“Really?” Wade said blankly, turning the page.

“Yeah.”

“That’s weird,” Maryanne said.

“Not so weird,” Wade said. “It was quite a hot book back then.”

“For Americans, though?” I said. “It doesn’t seem like a lot of Americans would—”

“No, it was definitely part of the hippie samizdat,” Wade said.

“She always told me that my other mom, you know, that my other mom stole it from her.”

“You have two moms?” Maryanne said.

“I’m adopted.”

“Well, I bought the book secondhand in Enswell,” Wade said. “Maybe I bought your other mom’s copy without knowing it.”

“Yeah”—I spoke slowly—“that’s probably it. She probably sold it to buy drugs.”

“Maybe,” Wade said quietly.

I craned my neck and leaned around Wade to look at Maryanne. “My real mom OD’d,” I said. I wanted her to come over and comfort me, but it was Wade who put his hand lightly and awkwardly on my back. After a too-brief pause he started recommending additional sources for Maryanne’s paper, which if I’m remembering correctly she never got around to writing.

O
N A FEW HOT NIGHTS DURING THE SUMMER OF ’78, Wade and my mother slept in his cool basement apartment, and I moved into her queen-sized bed. (The heat has never kept me awake; my contented slumber through “oppressive” heat and humidity has bred envy.) On those nights when Wade and my mother slept in the basement, I would stay up late in my mother’s bed reading boy-detective stories, or so I once told Wanda, who I thought would like to picture me reading such stories on the same summer nights that found her under soft bedcovers aiming a flashlight at
Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary,
or
Story of O.
(Wanda was always a more sophisticated reader than I, as well as sexually precocious, but you’ll recall that she’s five years my senior, this last difference most accounting for the contrast in our summer-of-’78 reading.) I did sometimes read boy-detective stories, but rarely, and I don’t recall reading any on those nights when Wade and Marleen slept in the basement. Probably by the time Wanda was fully enraptured by her book, even stroking her flashlight as she read, her mouth slightly open, the light- and world-blocking covers too warm for summer (though Wanda’s family had central air), probably by that time I was well into my night’s first boring dream.

Wade generally kept the plywood door to his apartment unlocked, so I sometimes went down there to watch his fish or listen to his stereo. His speakers, Frankenstein creations made by his drumming friend Karl Tobreste, were the size of cigarette vending machines. They stood on the obligatory maroon shag, pointing toward his bed from opposite sides of his sleeping area (much of the sound got lost in the dust under his never-hidden-away hideaway). A nude by an Enswell photorealist named Lloyd Gibson hung across from the bed, above the speaker-flanked modular storage unit of bricks and boards, which held some of Wade’s books, his favorite records, his stereo, some knickknacks, objets d’art, and mementoes: an ashy incense holder; a series of misshapen, variously eaten ceramic doughnuts made by a clever but clumsy niece (these doughnuts especially rattled at certain woofer eructations); a framed photo of his grandfather wrestling a bear; a broken Philco radio. Gibson’s painting—which owing to the shelves was hung too high, so that it nearly touched the low ceiling—profiled an erotically fleshy woman with brick-red hair, wearing Ray Bans and a Milwaukee Brewers cap, getting out of a pink bathtub, water cascading from her liquory backside and dripping from two fangs of pubic hair. I also have some recollection of the painting’s fogged mirror and the grime on the tile grout, but I might have added those details later. A few times I lay on Wade’s hideaway for a long while staring at Sharon Gibson (the model, though it was hard to tell with the cap and sunglasses, was Lloyd’s wife, the night manager at Piggly Wiggly and an acquaintance of my mother’s), listening mainly to Manilow and Manchester, sometimes to Seger or Sands. The mattress had a magnetic indentation in its center. I wish I could remember what speculative, protosexual thoughts I had during those whiles, though having wished this I feel I’ve abused myself.

My mother Marleen rented that house in Enswell for nine years. She was always a homebody but never bought a home, though after both her parents were dead, she took over their modest, paid-off ranch house, an arrangement my more affluent aunt accepted but resented. The inheritance from my grandparents wasn’t large, I gather, but wasn’t insignificant. My adoptive grandfather, an engineer for a company that made circuit breakers and other electric-power equipment, earned decent money but was something of a spendthrift. Anyway, the house in Enswell was a boxy two-bedroom with two front windows, pale gray asbestos siding, and a tiny wooden stoop that my mother called a deck. It was on Queal Street just off Foster Avenue, near where Queal’s westernmost yellow center dash pointed across Foster to the front door of Oran’s Bar. To our immediate west was the aforementioned parking lot of a large Lutheran church, whose chestnut bricks looked more red than brown in the sun, and whose spire sometimes cast a shadow on those entering Oran’s in the arguably not-late-enough afternoon. During the warmer months of the school year, I’d routinely spend a few afternoon hours in the lot, popping my anemic wheelies, jumping off curb ramps, trying to avoid parked cars as narrowly as possible, drawing invisible zeroes, ampersands, eyeballs, and apples with my tires (if there were puddles on the lot, I could make these shapes visible, but then they weren’t quite the shapes I had in mind). On some summer days, I biked around the lot all day, sometimes found the repetitive tricks and near-tricks transporting. Around six o’clock, my mother would open the back screen door and call out: “Hot dogs!” “Burgers!” “Taco salad!” “D-Luxe Frenchies!” “Tuna casserole!” In the summer we ate on the railed, wooden front stoop almost every night, listening to the v-eights and eight tracks whizzing by on Foster, our plates in our laps, our metal folding chairs (hers silver, mine in the standard dun) facing the largely uneventful street but slanted slightly toward each other.

Wade moved into the basement apartment in early ’77, probably in February. Strange, considering North Dakota’s climate, to make a move at that time of year. He’d been living with Karl Tobreste, whose wife, I later heard, had lost patience with Wade and demanded a hasty exit. He and Karl made several trips to our place in an old yellow pickup, icicles hanging from its grille like drool from a Saint Bernard. They held a long, testy debate in the snow and cold about how to get Wade’s plaid hideaway down the stairs and in the apartment’s narrow door, Karl maintaining in a very Plains-speaking shout that such an operation was impracticable, Wade eventually hitting Karl on the back of the head with one of the hideaway’s scratchy seat cushions. My mother and I, undetected as far as I know, watched the argument from our dining alcove. Karl wore an orange snowsuit, permanently stained with what looked to be day-old dirt of the kind one picks up in a corral tussle; Wade wore faded Erizeins, a parka the color of a root-beer Popsicle, and fur earmuffs. We cracked a window to hear them better. “Let’s just take the door off its hinges,” Wade said. “It still won’t fit,” Karl said. (But it did.) Without looking at me, my mother whispered, “Which one of these fools did you say is moving in?” I’d talked briefly with the men a few hours earlier. “The one with the longer hair,” I whispered. Her head drew back subtly as if she’d been filliped on the chin. “Easy on the eyes,” she said.

Some morning not long after he moved in, Wade jump-started my mother’s car for what must have been one of its last rides. Another time, maybe three months later, he gave me the thumbs-up for a wobbly run of no-hands. But mostly he kept to himself. Then one night in what I guess was August of ’77, I was eating alone on the front stoop and saw Wade coming home on foot, probably from Oran’s. I held up my plate: “Wanna dog?” Really there were no extras. He declined, but I must have planted or watered an idea in his head, because a week later my mother and I were out in our small, mostly dirt backyard, I pogo-sticking, she lighting a rusty Coleman stove, when Wade’s car crunched into the driveway, and he got out with a bag full of groceries, pointed to the stove, and said, “Have any room for another burger on there?” We did. He pulled out a six-pack of soda from the bag. “D’ya wanna drink your pop from the can or out of a glass?” he asked me.

“Um,” I said.

“I’d like to offer you a frosty mug,” he said, “but I don’t have one, frosty or not. I’m thinking about buying one, though, doing some research. My buddy has a back-issue of
Consumer Reports
that rates ’em.”

“Can’s good,” I said.

“Can’s good,
please,”
my mother said.

“Can’s good please.”

“It’s not cold. How ’bout on the rocks?”

I nodded and he went downstairs to grab a glass of ice and two regular beers. The ice cubes, made of Bubble Up, were impaled with toothpick handles, which I pulled out and put in my pocket. I sat on the backyard’s rotting picnic table while the adults talked, my mother flipping the burgers more than necessary. Her connoisseur’s spatula, a gift from her father that later fell to me, had been washed only by the rain, and Wade teased her about its filth, I remember, but I don’t remember what else they talked about. When the burgers were almost done, my mother went inside to change out of her tank top into a silky, honeydew-green blouse (what a great word,
honeydew;
I only realized it now), and Wade sat down with me at the picnic table, shaded by a warty bur oak with conjoined trunks. The Lutheran church’s brick, one-story office building, which marked the southern border of our backyard, had forced the decapitation of some of the oak’s limbs, but that seemed to add to the tree’s gothic charm. Wade and I talked about football. He said I was wrong to like the Cowboys. “Root for the underdog,” he said. “Always.” That night he and my mother sat on the stoop, talking till after my bedtime, playing Joni Mitchell, Keith Jarrett, and Bolling Greene records on the living-room stereo loud enough for the music to sift heartily through the front screen. A week later he settled in upstairs, though he continued to rent the basement apartment, as noted earlier, apparently continued to mail rent checks for a few months even after he left impetuously on the also previously mentioned morning of November 11, 1978, this time locking the door and not leaving a key. We had to ask the landlady to come over so we could save Wade’s fish, which I kindly adopted.

M
Y COPY OF GÉRARD ZWANG’S
Le sexe de la femme
arrived a few days ago. Naturally I didn’t expect the paperback reissue to match the original, enticingly described in one of Linda Nochlin’s essays as a “limited edition, luxe, pseudoscientific, soft-porn production.” Still, I hoped it would be something more than what I’ve been sent. The original, from what I gather, is heavily pictorial, whereas this is almost all text (of which I can only read fragments), here and there interrupted by Jacques Zwang’s anatomical drawings. I should probably try to work through a few pages with a French-English dictionary, or if nothing else translate the reissue’s introduction, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who in the fifties bravely published
Story of O,
the complete works of Sade, and other dirty classics, but, having recently given up coffee, I’m too tired for a laborious translation. I have at least browsed the book’s clever glossary, made up mostly of literary quotes. Really I’m not interested in actually reading Zwang’s book, though I’d skim it if it were translated into English. Last night, however, I happened to return to my apartment at the same time as my across-the-hall neighbor, to whom I’ve said hello a few times and who I thought might be from Côte d’Ivoire or Togo; there are small communities of Twin Citians from those countries, and he reminded me of a Togolese guy I worked with for a few months at a call center. We’ve hardly spoken before, and I’m not habitually so forward, but I was in good, almost giddy spirits (yesterday, to combat a headache, I allowed myself one cup of coffee), so as I was fiddling with my keys I asked this neighbor if by chance he spoke French. He is West African, as I’d guessed, though not from a Francophone country. But, it further turns out, not wholly unfamiliar with the French tongue. He told me his name and I immediately forgot it, along with his actual country of origin. I offered him dinner and he agreed to essay some rough translations of a few passages from Zwang.