Frolic of His Own (87 page)

—I don't give one damn who it is, how long have you been standing there! catching her balance against the chair —and what's that thing.

—Remember it? this canoe I made from that birch tree down by the pond? I just found it up with my . . .

—Give it to me! Here, get rid of it will you? flinging an arm toward the fire as he held it closer sitting down slowly, staring at her bent down shaking the smouldering pages aflame —with this mess of the past where it belongs? Immortalizing him in the annals of First Amendment law he
knew what he was doing all the time, drawing up our will leaving everything to the survivor, a mortgage on a penthouse that has to be sold to pay it and a half dozen eggs in the . . .

—Christina?

—A pill and a drink and a pill destroying himself in front of my eyes he knew what he was doing, half a million dollars to prop up the firm's image while I survive on a half dozen . . .

—But Christina? if you'd died, Christina? his voice abruptly plodding as his logic —and your will left everything to each other, if you'd died first? Then half this house would be Harry's now, it would be half mine and . . .

—Oscar my God don't be morbid! I didn't die he did and stop looking at me like that, Lily get that napkin and wipe his chin he looks half witted, Harry died and I'm standing right here in front of you with my, where's that drink never mind, I'll get it myself!

—But if you had Christina! echoed after her heels down the hall, —he'd be standing right here in front of me with, he'd be buying my half from me with my own blood money from his senior partner share because I can't buy his half can I? so he can sell it to some west coast millionaire who'll tear it down to build a showplace like that nightmare on the corner where the screaming of the chainsaws suddenly brought him to his feet, to the window where he stood cradling the wrecked canoe, wiping his face with the dry napkins where she stood up close beside him with her shock of loose blonde hair fallen on her beaded forehead and the beading on her lips bare of any trace of lipstick and her fragrance from her blouse loosely buttoned pressed against him, he'd been lied to all his life, just as he'd appeared to triumph with a farce sprung from a lie in a fight to prove his courage by the old man driven back to the earth's remotest border, from his refuge as an immortal offering to share his kingdom, ruler of the North-West wind, the home-wind, the Keewaydin shifting now on the surface of the pond laying low the yellowed grasses where so long ago the birch tree rustling in the breeze of morning laid aside its white skin wrapper as she pressed herself against him in the shadow of the pine trees, made a bed with boughs of hemlock where the squirrel, Adjidaumo, from his ambush in the oak trees watched with eager eyes the lovers, watched him fucking Laughing Water and the rabbit, the Wabasso sat erect upon his haunches, watched him fucking Minnehaha as the birds sang loud and sweetly where the rumble of the trucks drowned the drumming of the pheasant and the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah gave a cry of lamentation from her haunts among the fenlands at the howling of the chainsaws and the screams of the wood chipper for that showplace on the corner promising a whole new order of woodland friends for the treeless landscape, where Thumper the Rabbit and Flower the Skunk
would introduce the simpering Bambi to his plundered environment and instruct him in matters of safety and convenience by the shining Big-Sea-Water, by the shores of Gitche Gumee where the desolate Nokomis drank her whisky at the fireside, not a word from Laughing Water left abandoned by the windows, from the wide eyed Ella Cinders with the mice her only playmates as he turned his back upon them with his birch canoe exulting, all alone went Hiawatha.

Out over the pond a strange gloom had descended and the wide lawn slipped into the water as though it were flooding, not a cloud in the sky to fault for the sudden change in the light where the far bank was gone abruptly in a dull strip of grey and the middle distance seemed to advance and recede, the whole pond to heave as it ebbed from the foot of the lawn in a rising swell toward the other side like some grand seiche coming over it rocked by a catastrophe in the underworld, wavering as the swell returned, retreating in a massive unbroken rhythm like the tipping from side to side of a giant bowl as she clung with a hand to the sill swept by a wave of vertigo suddenly gathering her blouse to her throat to turn away gasping for breath in the cloud of smoke curling toward her from the fireplace. —Christina? She stood there for a moment still till shaken by a cough, eyes watering from the smoke looking for something, anything to prod the smouldering heap into flames, seizing the manila folder rolled like a stave bent down to thrust it at the embers raising a blue flame that crept along the margin and leaped to yellow life as she stood away from the blaze emptyhanded in the smoke and the stillness broken only by the sound of footsteps somewhere, suddenly calling out —Christina? as the silence broke all about her with the crash of a door.

—Oscar stop! where he'd burst out from behind it —stop it! Stop I can't, no stop tickling me I can't breathe! I can't, Lily! Lily come here quickly I can't, Lily help me!

WILLIAM GADDIS
has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the winner of a MacArthur Prize. Author of
The Recognitions, JR,
and
Carpenter's Gothic,
Mr. Gaddis is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives on Long Island.

SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

Published by Simon & Schuster New York

ALSO BY

W
ILLIAM
G
ADDIS

THE RECOGNITIONS

J R

CARPENTER'S GOTHIC

SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

Simon & Schuster Inc.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by William Gaddis

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1995

SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION
and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc. under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Designed by Barbara M. Bachman

Cover design by Cheung Tai

Cover illustration by Sarah Gaddis

Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gaddis, William, date.

A frolic of his own : a novel / William Gaddis.

p. cm.

1. College teachers—United States—Fiction. 2. Copyright—United States—Cases—Fiction. 3. Dramatists, American—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.A28F76   1994      93-26098

813'.54—dc20      CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-671-66984-3

ISBN-10:        0-671-66984-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-80052-3 (Pbk)

ISBN-10:        0-684-80052-7 (Pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-439-12547-2 (eBook)

A portion of this book originally appeared in
The New Yorker's
October 12, 1987, issue as “Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al. in the United States District Court, Southern District of Virginia, No. 105-87.”

Details of the battles at Ball's Bluff and Antietam which appear in this book are drawn from
The Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln's Army
by Bruce Catton, Doubleday & Co., 1962. Copyright © 1962 by Bruce Catton. Lines on
page 29
are from
Literary Democracy
by Larzer Ziff, Viking, 1982.

Permission to reprint from the following is gratefully acknowledged: From
The Poetry of Robert Frost,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc. From
White Mischief
by James Fox. Copyright © 1982 by James Fox. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.