Résumé With Monsters (6 page)

Had it not been for the System, Philip's father would have been Somebody. The System had weakened Walter
Kenan
, had driven him to daily drinking, had saddled him with a shrill, ungrateful wife and a whining momma's boy for a son. Walter
Kenan
, who could have had a major league baseball career if the System hadn't set him up, would clutch tiny Philip's shoulders and lift him up and thump him against the wall, and say, "Are you listening to me? Look at me. I am trying to tell you the way it is. I am trying to prepare you."

After his father's attempts at education, Philip would lie in bed and his mother would come in and put her hand on her son's forehead and tell him that his father was a good man who was under a lot of stress.

One day things would be different, she said. She was a small woman with a round face and sad eyes—and it was only years later, when he found a photo of her in her high school yearbook, that Philip realized those eyes might have been capable of reflecting something other than pain.

Sometimes Walter
Kenan
would hit his wife. Philip understood that the System was responsible for this. Once Philip had seen his mother on her knees on the kitchen floor, her hair in her face, her body shaking with sobs, a garish splash of red on the floor—which proved to be tomato soup but lay forever in Philip's mind in the terror of spilled blood. His father, reeling over his kneeling wife, had looked up at Philip and said, "Damn woman can't even cook soup."

That night Philip's mother had again reassured her son that Walter
Kenan
was a good man and that one day things would be different. They were just having bad luck.

"The System," her son said. Philip was nine years old.

His mother smiled down at him.

"I wish—" Philip said. And he stopped. He was not sure what he wished. And then it came to him: “I wish the System would kill him."

"Oh Philip," his mother said. She leaned over and hugged him, and he could hear her labored breathing and smell the perfume she wore and feel the scratchy fabric of her waitress uniform. "You don't really mean that."

But he had meant it. "Now I lay me down to sleep..." he prayed in the darkened room. But when he had finished his petition to his mother's invisible god, he turned to the one of power. He prayed to the System. "Kill him," he hissed. "Please." He prayed to
Yog-Sothoth
and ancient
Cthulhu
.

#

After Philip had been in the hospital a week, AL Bingham came to visit.

“I don't like hospitals," Bingham said. He was wearing a hat, something a gangster in a forties film would have coveted, and a brown rumpled suit. No tie. "My wife went into a hospital for a routine check-up once, and that was the last of her. Doctor calls and says the test is positive, and I say, well that's a relief and he says no, positive isn't good. Negative is good. Positive means they shrink you with chemicals until you are small enough to bury in a shoe box."

"I'm sorry," Philip said.

Bingham waved a hand. "That was a long time ago. I just came to cheer you up. Was that your girlfriend I saw coming out of here?"

Philip said that indeed it was, and that it looked like they might get back together again.

"Hey, congratulations," Bingham said. "It's always good to see young folks resolve their differences. Life is short, et cetera."

"It's not absolutely for sure yet," Philip said.

She wants me to throw out my novel. She wants me to chuck 2000 pages. She wants me to rip my heart out and feed it to the paper shredder.

"I'm sure it will work out," Bingham said. Like many old people, the tone of his voice seemed to add that it would not matter in the long run.

"I got to get back to work," Bingham said. "Old Ralph is losing it. He keeps telling everyone that the typesetting broad will be back next week, when the way I hear it she is still unconscious. Eddie Shanks says our boss is just being optimistic, but I say he is losing it big time. He fired two printers last night, and this morning he hired some guy who doesn't speak

English and spends three-fourths of his time in the bathroom."

The old printer left, and Philip drifted back into fitful sleep.

Well?
Amelia had asked.

I don't know. I don't know if I can do it.

7.

Ralph Pederson always said, "Insurance is / a racket," and, since he did not want his workers to appear to be gullible fools, he did not offer them health insurance until they had been with him two years. Consequently, Ralph's One-Day Résumés had very few employees who actually were insured. Philip, a new employee, was most definitely not insured.

The hospital administration, running a cool

eye over Philip's physical and financial health, decided the former was far better than the latter, and they had Philip on crutches and out the door in five days.

Amelia drove Philip back to his apartment. She drove a small, maroon Honda, zipping through traffic with her usual flat-out, solemn concentration.

The day was overcast with occasional tremors of rain. In Philip's apartment, the pots and pans were full of water and the air had a thick, mildewed flavor of defeat. Fortunately, Philip's stay in the hospital had coincided with mostly clear skies and good weather, the rain arriving late last night. Had it been otherwise, the carpet would have required more than Amelia's industry with towels and a hair dryer.

Amelia helped him up the steps and into bed, a wobbly enterprise. His cast had been cut to mid-thigh, but it was still a huge, ungainly weight and Philip was weak and dizzy from the days of lying in bed.

Amelia started setting the apartment to rights immediately. She found cans of soup in the cupboard.

"You're welcome," she said, handing Philip a hot mug of chicken and rice soup. She went out the door and came back minutes later with the hospital plant. She put it down next to the sliding glass doors that led to the small deck and a view of the highway.

"This is a nice place," she said. "Sort of basic. I think the plant helps. I see you've got a new computer."

"Yes," Philip said, turning his head to look at the desk and the computer and printer that dominated it. "It really helps with the writing."

Amelia looked at him with her X-ray eyes. "I guess so," she said finally, turning away. "Well, I better be going," she said. A hand on the door, she turned back to him. "Are you going to be all right here without anyone?" she asked. "I don't feel right about leaving you."

"I'll be fine," Philip said. "Lily, my therapist, you met her, said she would come by. And I've got a phone, after all. The world is at my fingertips."

"Okay. Call."

And she was gone. No kiss this time. She had issued an. ultimatum in the hospital, and he had not replied. They were in limbo now, waiting. Philip waited himself, waited to see what he would do.

"Throw that awful novel out," Amelia had said, "and I'll come back."

The suspense was killing Philip. Would he do it? Could he?

Philip could not sleep. The pain increased, and he had to struggle out of bed, balancing awkwardly with his crutches, and hobble into the kitchen to fill a glass with tap water and swallow the two yellow pills. By the time he was once again in bed and had elevated his leg with pillows, he was exhausted. Life was going to be an ordeal until the cast came off.

The next morning Philip was awakened by a telephone call from Ralph Pederson.

"They told me you were out of the hospital," Ralph said. He was shouting, no doubt in order to hear himself over the din of the presses. "I'm glad to hear it. That Helga was sure nuts. I would have called earlier, but I figured you could use some rest. I can tell you we could use you down here."

Philip explained why he could not come into the office.

"I won't lie to you," Ralph said. "I'm disappointed. I know you are probably not one hundred percent, but I was hoping you could manage at least a few hours down here. That's the mark of a real trooper, that willingness to go the extra mile, to make a few sacrifices when the business is in a jam."

Ralph went on at some length, pausing only to shout orders to others in the shop.

"I can't make it," Philip said. "Sorry." He hung up.

Philip had just finished the elaborate business of washing himself without getting his cast wet, when Lily knocked on the door.

"Just a minute," he shouted. He dressed and let her in.

"I got some groceries," she said.

Lily fixed breakfast: eggs and bacon and grapefruit and toast and cereal and coffee and juice. Philip did not tell her that he never ate breakfast. Eating breakfast always made him feel the way he imagined a python must feel after devouring a rabbit.

"Okay," Lily said.

Philip knew what was coming.

"Counseling time," Lily said.

#

Philip hated talking about his life. It was not a good story, full of loose ends and implausibly motivated characters. There seemed to be no unifying theme, although perhaps that was the point of the whole exercise—to discover such a thing.

He had gone to a small college in northern Virginia, and he had met a girl named Elaine

Gregson
his sophomore year, and they had lived together for a couple of years. They were married in June, the year they graduated. The wedding was large, most of the guests being friends of Elaine's—she was a popular girl—or members of Elaine's substantial stock of family and relatives. Philip's mother came, as did several of Philip's friends, bookish misfits who huddled together, a dark-suited and sullen clump amid the brighter celebrants.

Philip's father was dead, but he was represented by Philip's grandfather, a dour, gray- bearded man who looked a little like Philip's father but did not drink and almost never spoke. It was never clear to Philip whether grandfather
Kenan
liked or disliked him.

Philip showed Lily photos of the wedding.

"She's very pretty," Lily said, looking up from the album. In the photo inspiring this observation, Philip's bride was lying on the ground in her green wedding dress, looking skyward, her smile demure. Her hands are hooked behind her head and her shimmering black hair is spilling out to the limits of the frame. You can see to the bottom of her dark eyes, and what is there is a white, pure contentment—a serenity at once arrogant and innocent—as the rich green grass springs up through her hair, and everything (the weather, her new husband, her friends) conspires to ensure her happiness.

"She's dead," Philip said.

"I'm sorry."

"Well," Philip said, realizing that he was uttering the precise words that Bingham had used in the hospital when similar condolences were offered, "that was a long time ago." He understood then that the hollowness was intentional, that the words were not meant to indicate healing or indifference, that they were, indeed, bitterly ironic.

"How did it happen?"

"She killed herself," Philip said.

Lily opened her mouth. Philip thought she might say it, might say, "That makes two," but she didn't.

She didn't say anything, but she looked so sad, so stricken, that Philip sought for words to comfort her, poor old woman.

"I don't think it was intentional," Philip said. "She was drinking a lot, and she was always going to all these different doctors, and she never really thought that pills and alcohol could harm her."

"Can you tell me about it?" Lily asked. She had moved to sit on the bed, and she rested her arm on Philip's armored leg.

Philip said, "Elaine was going to be a world- famous painter. Her degree was in fine arts and she painted these oil paintings that were terrific."

They were hard-edged, violently colored canvases, abstracts within which photorealistic details existed, a door knob, a tennis shoe, an apple. She was very serious about her work, and a professional; she worked every day. Whenever Philip thought of Elaine, he saw her in a gray apron, the pockets of which bristled with gaudy brushes. Her cheeks or forehead would usually bear some mark of the day's work, a splash of yellow or orange or some other primary color.