Boarded Windows (27 page)

The librarian at the rare-book room’s front desk was wearing a roller-derby T-shirt and reminded me slightly of Maryanne.
Le sexe de la femme,
which I’d called about earlier, was waiting for me behind her desk. Affecting a scholarly stereotype, I patted my pockets as if I’d misplaced my wallet, but the librarian seemed unconcerned about my pretended loss. She asked me where I wanted to work, then used both hands to carry Zwang’s heavy book over to a long, empty desk. The book was cheekily packaged like a Bible, with a fancy slipcase, two ribbon markers, and a supple leather cover bearing the title in formal gold lettering (there might have been gilt-edged pages as well, but I can’t remember). The paperback I’d ordered earlier wasn’t so much a shadow of this original as a faded Polaroid of the original’s shadow.

On the drive from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, I’d relistened to decades-old beginner’s French cassettes (perhaps my terminally tyronic accent carries a hint of wow and flutter), but having only reached unit twenty-three of French II, I couldn’t read Zwang’s text beyond an occasional word or phrase. I had limited reading time anyway.

Pictorially,
Le sexe
gives an eccentric history of erotic and pornographic art, with support from nonartistic documents. It’s very much a product of its time: it doesn’t scrimp the reader of Day-Glo pussies or bedroom surrealism (Roland Bourigeaud, André Masson, Jane Graverol, Hans Bellmer), including the surrealism that leads into or is pyschedelia or fantastic realism (Ernst Fuchs, Félix Labisse, Mati Klarwein). But the book contains images of all sorts going back to antiquity: cave drawings; Titian; a daguerreotype of a couple fucking in a haystack; Pierre-Paul Prud’hon; anatomical drawings by Leonardo; two views of
Le grand écart,
a bronze, nineteenth-century statuette of a ballerina without, the base reveals, underwear; Modigliani; anthropological photos of the type sometimes sought out by young masturbators; Rubens; photos of chastity belts; drawings of gynecological procedures; the great George Grosz; an Egyptian statuette; an American advertisement from 1960 for Vibra-Finger ($9.99), presented as a dental aid whose “novel design allows localized massage in needed areas”; Beardsley; a Babylonian cylinder; an anonymous drawing called
La revue des
inspiratrices
(“The Examination of the Muses”), in which about twenty women lift their skirts and pull their dresses below their breasts for a small team of male examiners; Rowlandson; several disturbing photographs accompanying the chapter contra female genital mutilation; photographer Lucien Clergue’s arty black-and-white nudes, which I once furtively examined as a teenage B. Dalton customer. There are other images I might like to name or describe, but my notes are shoddy; I find in my yellow notebook the following phrases without further explanation: “Indo-Chinese” (Indo-Chinese what?); “horse sex”; “bending over back of chair w/ [smudge].”

Stupidly, I wrote nothing at all about how
The Origin of the World
looks in Zwang’s book. It was hand-tinted I know, in pastel hues I want to say, but really I’m not sure how it looked. I spent just two hours with the book. I had a shoot in Minneapolis the next morning and a gig the next night with Papa Freud and the Lazy Vulvae, so I wanted to get a decent night’s sleep. But I did find, before leaving prematurely, a surprising artifact in between the book’s last page and its endleaf: a pubic hair. Or what I took to be a pubic hair; it may have been a short, squiggly, dark brown hair from someone’s curly head, though I didn’t entertain that possibility till later. The hair looked a lot like some of my own pubic hairs, and like others I’ve seen. My first explanation was that the librarian, sitting at her desk after I’d called to make sure
Le sexe
was on hand, had reached into her underwear to pluck a memento for me. (I’m said to have an attractive telephone voice, if that information seems relevant.) Snapping out of that fantasy, I then considered that the book I was about to close was the very one my mother Martha had stolen from my mother Marleen, the copy Wade had undoubtedly perused and perhaps indefinitely borrowed. The pubic hair had been Martha’s, I thought, was a kind of relic. Of course if Martha is still alive, the hair wouldn’t be a relic in the Catholic way I had in mind, but it could function in that way for me. I stared at the hair. I thought about touching it. I thought about slipping it into my pocket. I could keep it in a tobacco box with the strand of Wade’s hair I found in that world almanac.

It was better, I decided, to leave the hair where it was. Should you happen to go to the Golda Meir Library’s rare-book room and ask for Zwang’s book, I suspect you’ll find the hair and out of courtesy won’t displace it.

I was glad that it had turned overcast for my late-afternoon walk from the library back to the sub shop, where I bought a soda that I must have left on the roof of Wade’s car. It’s my car, but it still feels like his. My mind continued to drift for an unremembered number of minutes, during which I drove as if in a dream but apparently avoided an accident. Just seconds after I became aware again of my surroundings, I saw a sign for I-94, from which I was soon passing the baseball stadium, wondering if I’d ever been lost at all.

I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

I drove without music or French instruction till sunset, when I put on a tape I’d made in my late teens, with Steve Reich on the A-side, Porter Wagoner on the B. The juxtaposition wasn’t meant in the self-satisfied way of college-radio deejays, I don’t think—well, no doubt there was some self-satisfaction behind the pairing, but I also think I’d just happened to buy and tape those two albums on the same day. Reich’s music is suited to the sort of contemplative driving I enjoy, but it can be dangerously lulling, and when my eyes closed for the third time, I fast-forwarded to the B-side.

After a while I came to a Porter Wagoner song that drew incipient tears, the first I’d cried in a decade. I played the song a few more times and found that it could make me cry at the same spot every time. When I’ve cried in the past, I’ve often imagined that someone was watching me, from above or on a screen of some sort, and soon I’ve become too focused on how my tears might affect this unseen spectator. But this time I was able simply to cry, the tears strong and desperate by the third pass, strong and relieving by the fifth, somewhat attenuated and self-conscious by the seventh.

I drove near the speed limit in the right lane, let the other vehicles pass me, let the best lines from Wagoner’s songs pass through and circle my head: “Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old / Or a friend when you’re lonely, or a love that’s grown cold”; “What is to be will be, what ain’t to be just might happen”; “The light through the knot of my boarded window / Is just enough to keep me awake”; “Lord, I guess I haven’t learned a thing.” When an orange Yellow truck passed me, I gave the driver the thumbs-up and thought of Magritte, thought of Wade.

I imagined him at the radio station in Berlin. The studio is large but not as state-of-the-art as he may have hoped. Maybe the microphones aren’t even German. The pop guard is yellow instead of the standard black. Wade’s chair—it really is his chair, and sits in a corner during the other deejays’ shifts—is upholstered in torn, nubby, orange cloth; its squeaks can be heard over the air during quiet moments, such as a pause in his Porter Wagoner tribute, an emotional pause or a pause when he tries to find the German words to best describe a Nudie suit. There’s a lump in his throat as he finishes, then the tears start to tingle down his nasal passages, and he presses the remote button to start Turntable B.

I hit rewind and played the song one more time. I’m a careful driver, but the next car was a football field ahead of mine on a straight stretch of highway, so I closed my eyes and with perfect clarity saw Wade pull off his headphones and lean back in his loud chair, saw him rest his boots on the console and tuck some of his gray hair behind his left ear. I could see his thoughts, and he was thinking of my mothers, thinking of me, and when he looked over at the studio phone, all the oily line buttons were flashing red in free time.

A
bout a year into working on
Boarded Windows,
I started actually writing some of the Bolling Greene songs I’d been referencing in the manuscript. This eventually led to the novel’s companion album,
Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greeene,
which can be purchased as a CD or LP, or downloaded without charge (it’ll be Bolling’s gratis non-hit). To download the album, go to
soundtrax.com
, and enter the following code: s3uD6kjB.

The brief notes in the LP and CD to some extent try to proceed as if Bolling were a nonfictional country singer, though not to the point of giving him songwriting credit in the fine print, which isn’t really that fine. Despite the album’s title, only five of the album’s songs are, to my mind, covers of songs by this secondary character in my novel, and even these are somewhat free interpretations, with a few anachronisms and perhaps two or three lines that Greene wouldn’t have entertained or tolerated. The remaining songs derive from the novel’s narrative in other ways, or borrow some of its phrases, images, or themes.

To incite readers to seek out the handsomely packaged LP or CD, I’m going to refuse to list personnel and other credits in this setting. If you can’t find the album in a record store, or can’t find a record store at all, visit
dylanhicks.com
. Or see me at a reading, where folks who buy the book, or already and demonstrably own it, will be given a sharply reduced price on the LP or CD.

Boarded Windows
was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Caslon. Display fonts include Pussycat Sassy and Spin Cycle.

Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, from Target, and in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the State’s general fund and its arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008. Coffee House also receives support from: several anonymous donors; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Suzanne Allen; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; the E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Ruth and Bruce Dayton; Dorsey & Whitney,
LLP;
Mary Ebert and Paul Stembler; Fredrikson & Byron,
P.A.;
Sally French; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Carl and Heidi Horsch; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Carol and Aaron Mack; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Deborah Reynolds; Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner,
P.A.;
John Sjoberg; David Smith; Kiki Smith; Mary Strand and Tom Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Patricia Tilton; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation; Margaret and Angus Wurtele; and many other generous individual donors.

To you and our many readers across the country, we send our thanks for your continuing support.

DYLAN HICKS
is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in the
Village Voice, New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages,
and
Rain Taxi,
and he has released three albums under his own name. A fourth,
Sings Bolling Greene,
is a companion album to this novel. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and his son, Jackson. This is his first novel.