The Business of Naming Things (2 page)

Sewage and sewers and undergrounds, plumbing hidden, pipe works, many of them, going to a river bottom that's no longer a river; it's in a bigger body now. Mrs. White would be reminded of her son, who whiled away so much of his childhood in that basement, puttering alone amid his unfathomable fantasies, scheming with his friends, sneaking cigarettes and his father's girlie magazines, his mysterious, inevitable
passage from bright, sweet boy to the dark station of teenagehood transpiring there, beneath ground, and now, in her memory, under two hundred feet of reservoir water.

Her boy, Mark, had a bladder. And his mother recalled this, embarrassingly (it was in the papers), to the mother of the son—the donor—in a chance meeting at the candle factory. That is, to me. “My boy could hold an entire vat of juice before he would gush and gush for so long, his little penis would burn and the bladder itself would ache from how much it had spent,” she told me. She was so devastated by the loss, the notion of parts of him carrying on as disorienting to her as if she were in the early stages of a poisoning. She didn't know what she was saying. I had to cut her off and sit her down.

You see, I think of myself as “her” sometimes, and this is my problem. I find myself speaking of the Iowa woman as if she were myself, and vice versa. I make her come back to my town, the one underwater. I make her from here. It's all confused and dizzying. I find the third person more comfortable; it's easier for me to say, “Often she would think, This is an image of her mind” than to say, “Often I would think, This is an image of
my
mind,” even though it is the same thing. Perhaps it has to do with upbringing. I was always able to tell my son that he was as good as anyone else, that he could be anything he wanted, whereas I could not say the same to myself, or say that of myself to others. Or even complain.

But it is I who thinks often of the Quabbin Reservoir, since we lost Matthew—our vacation in Italy, roadside bandits, a gunshot, his forehead. I see myself walking along the reservoir bottom, what we returned to, and there meeting the ghosts of the four communities, walking—more like wading—from town to town, up the long hill to Enfield, now a dark, weedy
mound alive with bubbles and spiked with stalking muskellunge, or whatever, maybe pike—my husband would know; over to Greenwich, where the Jackson barn still wavers erect, and on to Prescott, where I wrecked our car on a culvert I still don't see. It's lonely down here, but somehow peaceful. Of course there's an absence of life, but then again, proof that there has been life. Between the towns of Enfield and Dana, on my way home, near an old wagon upended and headed for the water's surface but for the wagon tongue sunk in silt, I see that woman whose eyes are my son's, are mine. “What are you doing underwater?” I ask, and she rises, out of sight in a shaft of captured air and light, to the surface.

I
HAVE TRIED TO MAKE SOMETHING
, anything at all, of my boy's passing. I have told his life story to myself, over and over, starting from his conception on Pequod Hill one gorgeous May dawn, through his early troubles with his feet, to his Little League triumphs and his father's pride and the first girlfriend—and his father's fears!—and all the rest, those teenage years, right up to the shooting, and nothing coheres. But it's not only my boy's story that doesn't come together but everything else as well—my own story, my life as a mother, my parents', or my sister's life, or the life as I know it of June, my neighbor, and of anyone else I know who is not famous (their lives always seem to come together, don't they?).

What I can grasp is what is left of him—his eyes in the Iowa woman's head, his heart in the chest of the man from Amherst, his kidneys in that boy from the valley, whose name I know. I imagine they'll all meet sometime. I imagine I'll meet them all myself, too, in time, but as I say, I just imagine it. But when the moon is full and bright in the sky, that one
moon that is everyone's moon, I know it tugs on the tides of my boy, his humors, wherever they are. And as they lean together, in one direction to its pull, like the weeds under Quabbin, leaning, I know that each is aware of the other, of itself, of their original self. And as they move toward the light, wherever they are, at times like this I know the moon, and the water, and what it all means.

T
HE
B
USINESS OF
N
AMING
T
HINGS

H
E WAS IN THE BUSINESS OF NAMING THINGS
, like Adam.

William Claimer was very happy with this thought, which he formulated for himself on his forty-eighth birthday as he sat alone on the main concourse at Penn Station, waiting for a train. The molded chair he sat in, plastic and orange, held him like a hand. Claimer thought back: He'd been naming things for twenty-five years.

He could remember the first thing he'd ever named—his daughter, Elise. He loved the name, first of all—its sound; and he loved elision and the
g
missing from the French word for
church
. He had envisioned for his daughter a life of gentle winnowing, a life made by defining and excluding what one was not. All that in the absent
g
.

Actually, Elise was doing well now—she was at the Sorbonne. In a recent aerogramme she declared, with an acquired Gallic arrogance, that she believed in a kind of God that had no faith, an “atheosophy,” she called it. Pall, two years her junior and Claimer's only other child, was an early onamastic mistake (onamastics: the practice or science of naming). The idea was to refer to him as “Paul”; that is, to pronounce it
like the fine saint's name but to give in the spelling another option—a choice of sober introspection over piety, perhaps. But Pall from the very beginning refused a demeanor of dignified pall, and his friends, influenced by a trademark that the usually diligent Claimer had overlooked, began to call him “Mall,” a further nicking on the nickname Pall Mall, after the cigarette. Pall grew up sullen and harsh. At the moment, he was in jail. A pall of the wrong kind.

T
RADEMARKING WAS THE NAME
of Claimer's game, and he'd made a fortune at it. He'd begun in advertising, brighter than bright, top of his class everywhere—public school, prep school, college, college. An M.Phil. from University College, Dublin, a specialty in Hopkins.
Wolfsnow
was from Hopkins.

When the Seagram's account came forth with a new product—a frozen cranberry mix for vodka—he thought, Wolfsnow. They bought it, and how. Right down to the logo, a white wolf standing in the snow, a vague kill beneath its paws and the suggestion of droppings of blood. If it had been a grapefruit mix, inevitably a piss-pale yellow, Wolfsnow would not have done, would it? But then he wouldn't have thought of it.

Wolfsnow entered the vocabulary of mixology and Claimer became a partner.

He took over all the “vice” accounts—Seagram's, Liggett & Myers, a microbrewery. For a while, most of Claimer's duties fell to the spending of client money on campaigns long under way, but the firm soon was abuzz with the task of naming another new product—a nonalcoholic beer from Bard & Co., whose line of Bard lagers and ales was legendary in the
Northeast. Claimer came up with Innisfree, more poetic larceny, but his little world raved.

Ten years ago, Claimer packed up his peculiar genius and went on his own. He cribbed a paper from an obscure journal of onamastics dealing with the etymology of the naming of American towns, and sent the text to the most prominent journal in the building trades.

It was the eighties, and condominium communities were going up all over New England. Hillock Green, outside of Springfield, Arbor Grove in Bennington, Cedar Dale, between Northampton and Amherst, Pine Ridge in Southport, all were his. Easy money, forty to a hundred thousand per, depending on the size and price range of the development. Once he had established himself as an expert, all it required was a look at local history and a sensitivity to setting. And a good investment portfolio.

Claimer wasn't the only man in his field, of course, and he monitored his colleagues closely. He delighted in the Ohio fellow who came up with the two horn blasts in “Double A [honk-honk], M-C-O.” He admired the proprietary spirit of Robert Young gently insisting that it was “Sanka brand decaffeinated” coffee, to avoid the horror of all trademarkers—that a product name become a generic reference, like Kleenex. And he felt a little thrill when a naming went awry, like “Infiniti,” which, despite his own highly trained ear and eye he always pronounced “Infin-EE-ty,” as if the $45,000 luxury car were a diminutive form of
infin
, whatever that is. Ah, well. The fellow from Long Island shouldn't feel too bad: When Chevy's Nova was introduced into the Mexican market, the manufacturers suffered to realize it meant “won't go” in Spanish. Born loser, as the Chicanos would say.

Speaking of fate: Claimer didn't believe much in it. In
fact, he didn't believe in it at all. But what other word could explain buying salmon at the fish market that was wrapped in an out-of-town newspaper that contained a story about a community's decision to change the name he had given it? Perhaps
fate
is too common a word, but there is no explaining this, as there is no explaining why his wife did not come home for his birthday dinner that night. So he ate the two salmon steaks and composed a note to Clare, saying that he was getting out of town for a few days. He would leave the next morning.

H
E STOOD OUTSIDE
P
ENN
S
TATION
and smoked a joint. He still smoked joints. It was his single vice. It kept him young, he felt. He'd only resumed the pot habit—and it wasn't really a habit—around the time he began to jog, to reduce a slight paunch. He had Pearl Jam and Arrested Development and a few other hot bands in his tape carousel at his office. He liked to hew to a younger rhythm.

It was pleasing to feel connected to today's youth, and it felt less dangerous. Reading about Ice-T in the
Journal
did a funny trick. And he couldn't help notice that the high end of today's consumer culture wanted him to feel connected and safe, accepted. The new bodies: Not buxom and buffed as in his courting days (which would make him feel old, wouldn't it, and desperate), but lean, hard, waifish models like that Kate Moss of the Calvin Klein ads with her hands in Markey Mark's pants, or standing by herself, holding her own feeble breast. She wanted a meal from a man with means, a man with silk boxers.

It was irrational to be seduced by this nonsense, to be swayed and persuaded. After all, Claimer had spent two dozen
years being faithful to Clare. He drove a Volvo. He even had a gun. And yet, here he was, feeling something beginning to loosen. He felt himself edging toward an indiscretion, a fault line, however dangerous.

There were ten minutes until the train, so Claimer decided to grab a coffee before boarding. A woman who'd eyed him twice already walked over to him. She was spectacularly freckled. The close-set orange dot work on her forehead looked like an enlargement of orange lithography. Her eyes were green.

She said, “Are you Henry?” obviously there to meet someone she'd never met before. There was a loveliness to her that the wild smatter of her skin made unreachable, like a child disappearing in a pointillist landscape. She looked about thirty.

Even though it was November, she was in short sleeves. Her arms carried an even finer dot than her face, the orange approaching salmon. She seemed otherworldly, from another planet or species.

Claimer said “No” to her question, before thinking about it. He might have said “Yes.”

She immediately turned, sharp on one toe—she had heels on. Her dress was a green pinafore and her legs were stockinged white. Her figure was as narrow as an ironing board.

She strode back to an older balding man with square tinted glasses, like the ones Ari Onassis wore. He looked evenly at Claimer over the woman's shoulder. Her hair was a brassy yellow and hung straight down her back, ending at the middle of her small ass like a perfect broom. The man said something to her, and the two of them moved on.

Later, sipping the coffee that tasted as if two cubes of cardboard had been dissolved in it, he saw them again. Claimer was on the main floor, cupped in his seat. He could see them milling about at the top of the escalator, looking for Henry.

Claimer was tempted to do it, claim he was just checking them out, that he really was Henry, and take it from there. These are the kinds of things people do in stories—they walk up and become another person just to see where it will take them. Claimer liked that, the abandon of it, and wished it for himself. That's when he realized what he was: in the business of naming things. Like Adam.