The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (28 page)

I only lost my temper, truly lost my temper, once. Displayed concerted cruelty only the one time. When he refused to eat. When I tried to feed him a starling that I had found, that I had caught for him, and he refused it. I held it by its feet with tongs and dangled it so close to his craw that as I tried to tempt him with it, it would bump into his snout, a feather would catch on one of his teeth. But he ignored it, or tried to, couldn’t prevent his nostrils from flaring at the smell of it, the small bird full of fear and unable to fly away no matter how furiously it shook.

He wouldn’t eat it, and so I threw it at him, broke its neck, I believe, on his chest, and then I gathered it up, took it away, roasted it in the oven, and showed it to Father once more, showed him that I would eat it if he would not, but I couldn’t suffer the smell of it, began to retch even as I drew it to my face, and so I threw it away.

His claws fell away almost immediately upon his death, his snout shrank back to a reasonable size, his body returned to its previous near-bald state, and the madness leaked from his eyes, leaving small orange tracks, like painted tears, down his cheek, his innocent brown pupils surrounded once more by a pure white sclera. The lycanthropic demon had, of course, left its vessel once the vessel could no longer sustain life. His teeth, the canines, are not
missing
, no, but are in my possession. I removed them shortly before he died, and when removed, they were three inches long, could have been, perhaps, longer as I was unable to remove them from the root, broke them, by accident, at the gums.

Would you or anyone else deny me the symbol of my mother’s ruination?

I do not claim to understand the physics, or, rather, the biology behind the process of my father’s transformation, first into a wolf and then, once dead, back into himself, and while it defies explanation that his teeth have also reverted back to the shape and size they were before he changed, this change, in light of all of the other changes performed after his death, seems only fitting, does it not?

When I finally unlocked the basement door, almost two weeks after she had walked herself down there, I had covered my face in a thick, wet towel. I carried with me two large boxes of baking soda and the shovel.

No weapon of any kind? you might ask. No form of protection?

Discounting the shovel, no, no weapon. She was dead, I was sure of it, and if not dead, so close to death that she would have posed no threat. As for protection, my best protection would have been earplugs. I had prepared myself for the sight of my brothers and sisters, exhumed, eviscerated, had even prepared myself for the sight of Mother, wasted and ruined, the sight of her splayed out across the floor, facedown, her back rising in quick, shallow breaths, had prepared for all of that, but could not suffer the bald and angry mewling noises escaping with each exhalation.

Mother’s hair I collected in bags, swept up piles of her fur, bagged the bunch of it, and set the bags in my closet. She was, I’m certain, once as covered in fur as my father, but her hair grew coarse and then fell out in clumps as her food supply dwindled, as her body lost the strength to maintain even the simplest functions. The bags are still there, I’m sure, in the closet, as innocuous as those bags ready to be delivered to Goodwill, but I am not sure what use I or anyone else might find for them.

I secured him to the ceiling with strong bolts and thick chains that made him hang, uncomfortably, I hoped, so that his feet could touch the ground, but only if his long arms were stretched to their limit.

Then I went into the woods. I had to drive there, as all the woods around our house had been replaced by houses and stores and roads. I went into the woods and I found a good, clean perch next to a small but loud enough waterfall, and that’s where I sat. I had my father’s notebooks with me to use as a guide, and I had my rifle, and I waited for my father’s favorites to fly into view, to stop at a nearby tree, or even glide lazily overhead, and I shot them, as many as I could, which were very few considering how long I sat, how many shots I fired, but enough for me to bring back to the house a box heavy with them. He had not eaten for four or five days, and I knew that despite their now cooling bodies, despite his love for their blank and uncomprehending eyes, Father would have made short work of them. I laid them out in a wide circle just out of his reach, and then I hung from the ceiling with a bit of fishing wire one of Henslow’s sparrows, hung it just in front of his snout. I laid them out and sat against the opposite wall and watched him squirm, lick his chops, stretch his neck out to the sparrow, almost, almost, as far as he could stretch, and then, exhausted, his head would fall back. He would whimper and whine.

It wasn’t until after the end, once starvation, not me but starvation, had finished him off that I pulled him down from the ceiling, laid him out, lifeless, across the kitchen table, and, using the bread knife, opened him up and went digging for my father.

Farewell, Africa

I.

No one, apparently, had thought to test the pool before the party to see that it worked. The pool, which was the size of a comfortable Brooklyn or Queens apartment, had been designed by Harold Cornish and had been commissioned as a memorial installation for the Memorial Museum of Continents Lost. It was the centerpiece of the museum as well as the party celebrating the museum’s opening. In the center of the long, wide pool was a large, detailed model of the African continent. According to Cornish, the pool, an infinity pool, would be able to re-create the event of Africa sinking into the sea. “Not entirely accurately,” he told me early into the party, before anyone knew the installation wouldn’t work. “But enough to give a good idea of how it might have looked when it happened.”

Harold Cornish is the artist responsible for
The Cube
as well as
The Barge
, both of which are larger installation pieces—respectively, an overlarge cube perched, by some mysterious mechanism, on top of a cube not much larger than an end table and which has been set on its side, and a brushed-steel barge city that floats in the middle of Lake Erie that, for a year, was Cornish’s home and studio and that can easily accommodate, according to Cornish’s estimates, a population of a hundred thousand people. The pool, which he has named
The Pool of African Despair Pool
, is his first commissioned work and is the first work he has constructed as a memorial. It is also the smallest work he has designed since leaving art school, and it is the first piece of his to utilize hydraulics.

The walls of the pool, which stop at just below the water’s level, are retractable and are set on hydraulic lifts, and should have slowly begun to creep upward so that less and less water could escape over the pool’s edge. The walls would continue to rise, then, until no water could escape, so that soon the pool would fill up and the water level would rise and then cover the sculpture of Africa completely. This was all supposed to happen quite gradually over the course of the entire evening, leading up to the time Owen Mitchell would deliver his speech.

As I made my way through the party, though, I walked by the pool on occasion to check its progress, but couldn’t tell that anything was happening, which I at first attributed to my own ignorance of the mechanism of memorial installations or of art itself. But when I mentioned this to Mitchell, who seemed to be paying as much attention as I was to the pool and then to his watch, he shook his head, sighed, and said, whispering, “The damn thing’s not working.” Then he took a sip of champagne and said, “Too bad this didn’t happen with the real Africa.”

II.

If you were to ask Owen Mitchell about his speech, his most famous speech, the speech often referred to as the Farewell, Africa speech, he would tell you that it was a full fifteen minutes too long.

“You look at that speech,” he told me shortly after I met him in his hotel room as he was preparing for the party. “You read the whole thing; I think you’ll agree with me. You can say about twenty minutes, about twenty minutes’ worth of words, real and good words about the sinking of the African continent, and the rest is fluff, is posturing, or you start to see the speech repeat itself or traffic in generalities, which, fine, which, okay, that’s standard practice, that’s not great, but it’s acceptable, for another ten minutes, that’s acceptable, and another ten minutes puts you up to a thirty-minute speech.” Mitchell shook his head and then sighed and said, “The president, however. The president had a time block. Forty-five minutes, he told me. ‘It’s up to you to write me that speech,’ he said. And frankly, forty-five minutes? At least fifteen minutes too long.”

Mitchell has been known to edit the speech down. Whenever he would come across the speech in a bookstore or when he was at someone’s house and saw that they owned a copy of the speech, which was, for a long time, being reprinted in textbooks and on its own, he would pull it off the shelf and turn to the beginning of the speech and then start to cross out words and sentences and, sometimes, entire sections.

“Once,” he told me, “I got carried away and accidentally edited a friend’s copy of the speech down to a five-minute affair. Ten minutes if you read it really slowly.” He laughed and said, “I saw what I’d done and quietly put the book back on the shelf and then, later in the evening, made a show of finding it on the shelf again and pulling it down and then pretended to be shocked at what someone had done to it. My friend was so embarrassed and upset that for a moment I almost told him the truth, but I never did.”

I asked him what he cut out when he edited these, if he had specific passages he always cut out, or if his edits were subject to some kind of whim.

“Whim, mostly,” he said, wrestling with the bow tie that went with his tuxedo. “But there are parts that I will always edit out.”

“Like what?” I asked him.

“The very beginning, those first lines,” he said. “Every time. Those are the worst. No matter what, I always cross out that first part.”

When he told me this, I was surprised and not a little disheartened, for while I am not a huge fan of the Farewell, Africa speech—I find his first inauguration speech and the speech he wrote for Jameson when Jameson first proposed the creation of the office of world governor to be both more eloquent and full of more promise and sturdier judgment than the Farewell, Africa speech—what I liked most about the speech were its beginning lines, which, with their oddly syncopated repetitions, create a verbal space, in my opinion, anyway, of unsettled comfort or discomfiting calm, the only kind of space, in any case, that might prepare the public for the announcement that the African continent was sinking inexorably, inevitably into the sea.

“Must we say”—the speech begins—“have we come to that moment when we must finally say, are we now at that final moment when we must say, with sadness in our hearts but determination in our hearts, too.”

“That part?” I asked him. “That’s the part you will cut out no matter what?”

“Every time,” he told me. Then he checked himself and his tie in the mirror, and then he checked his profile, and then he shook his head and looked at me and smiled, and then he said to me, “Tonight, the speech I’m reading tonight? I’ve knocked it down to twenty-five minutes. And that’s without trying to rush through it.”

When the museum’s board of directors first approached Mitchell about the museum opening, he politely declined. He left the administration shortly after the Farewell, Africa speech to run for office himself, hoping the speech would thrust him onto the political stage, but he was handily defeated in an ugly, vicious campaign, and since then, he has done his best to distance himself from his failed foray into politics and the speech. Not because he dislikes the speech, so he explained to me, but because for so long he found himself defined by that speech and that speech alone.

At first, then, he had little interest in resurfacing at a party celebrating the opening of a museum commemorating the sinking of Africa. When the board of directors contacted him again and asked him to reconsider, however, he had a change of heart.

In the past ten years, Owen Mitchell has published a novel to little acclaim and designed various portable housing models, which he has submitted to competitions and to the World Disaster Relief Organization, but, for his troubles, has so far only received letters thanking him for his interest in world disaster relief. He worked briefly as a lobbyist and then as a lawyer. He has taught both graduate students and high school students, and once he was the host of the Academy Awards—“the technical stuff, you know, the part they film and record and show clips of during the real thing,” he told me—but he has yet to rediscover the success or pleasure he had achieved while working as a speechwriter.

“So, after thinking about it for a while,” he told me as we spoke in the museum courtyard, when I asked him what had changed his mind, “I realized, sadly, that this speech was the last good thing I’d done.” He shrugged his shoulders, popped an hors d’oeuvre into his mouth, and looked like he was about to say something else, then thought better of it, and then looked over and past my shoulder and said, “Uh-oh. Looks like they’re draining the pool now.”

III.

When I first met Karen Long, two days before the museum opening party, she had an easy and relaxed air about her. Karen is the events planner for the museum, and she was giving me a tour of the exhibits and party space and laying out for me the itinerary for the opening night celebration. She walked slowly and talked very quickly, and for a while I worried that she would finish telling me about the exhibits long before she had finished showing them to me, and I wondered if she was perhaps more nervous than she had been letting on.

“This is my first big event for the museum,” she told me when she met me in the front hall. Then she laughed and said, “Not that I haven’t done a ton of other big events.” And then, a few minutes later, as she was demonstrating an interactive world model for me (“For the kids, you know, who love this kind of hands-on stuff. See? Here? If you push Japan down with your foot, how it stays down? But if you push Spain down, it pops right back up? We’ll provide galoshes, of course.”), she interrupted herself: “Not that there could be another event I could have planned for the museum, since this is the opening night, right?” Then she slapped me playfully on my shoulder.

“Now I’ll take you to see our exhibit of relief trailers. I think you’ll like it. It’s quite impressive.”

Before she took her current position with the museum, Karen worked in publicity and events planning for the Walt Disney Company, and before that she worked as an intern in the administration’s communications office, where, briefly, she worked for Owen Mitchell before Mitchell left.

She deftly led me through the museum and its exhibits and answered almost all of my questions, knowledgeably and smoothly, but would not confirm or deny the rumor that the museum wasn’t able to find anyone from Old Africa to attend or speak at the opening. Instead she said, smiling her wide and toothy smile, “We’re very excited, you know, about the delegation from Old Japan. And of course the representatives from Costa Rica. Or maybe it’s Honduras. I’ll have to check my notes.”

The first time I saw Karen the night of the opening, she was standing over the pool next to Cornish, watching as the water drained out of it. I walked over to her, not sure exactly how I would phrase the question I wanted to ask her, namely,
How’s it going?
Or, for that matter, any other question I might ask her, since the answer to those questions—
Is the pool working all right?
,
Is it true that the waitstaff is almost out of champagne?
, and
Is it true that a number of the bottles of champagne have gone missing?
—seemed either obvious or, in light of the situation, mean-spirited. Not to mention that she would, in each case, I was certain of it, decline to comment.

It didn’t matter as she saw me coming toward her, and before I could even say hello, she asked me, “Do you know anything about fixing hydraulics?” I said no. “Then I can’t use you right now, but thanks for your kind effort to be helpful.”

I smiled at this and then asked her if it would be okay if I shadowed her for a few minutes.

“Really?” she asked. “Watching me watch this pool drain is newsworthy?” That was all she said before she turned back to look at the pool, which had almost completely drained, and so I took her nonanswer as a yes, and for five more minutes, the three of us—Karen, Cornish, and myself—stood there and waited as the pool dried up. Then Cornish stepped over the wall and got on his hands and knees, the wet spots at the bottom of the pool turning his gray wool trousers black, and he opened a gear box, or something like a gear box, and after another few minutes, he said, “Oh. Okay. I think I’ve got it.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. Won’t be but another ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Fine,” Karen said. “I’ll leave you to it.” Then she looked at me and shook her head, with disgust or anger or frustration, I couldn’t tell, just as I couldn’t tell if this was directed at me or at the situation or at Cornish or at the world at large. Then she walked past me quickly enough to make me hurry behind her, but not so fast that I couldn’t have kept up.

Over her shoulder, she said, “I’m sure you’ve heard about the champagne by now.”

I feigned ignorance, and she stopped, and I nearly ran into her. She looked me square in the eyes, and the beginnings of a smirk or grin made one side of her mouth twist up. Karen Long has piercing blue eyes and pale, pale blond hair that she often uses to cover her face, which is a soft, oval face brought into sharp relief by a long, not unattractive, angular nose. It seemed for a second, as she stared at me, that she might punch me in the face. That, or lean in to kiss me on the mouth. It was an unsettling look, and then it passed, and then she said, “And you no doubt know that ten bottles of champagne went missing entirely?”

I nodded, afraid of what she might do if I tried lying again.

“Well. That’s what I’m doing right now,” she said, “looking for those bottles or the people who took them. If you’re going to follow me around, you might as well know what I’m doing so you don’t think I’m just wandering aimlessly.”

I nodded again and said, “Sure thing,” and said, “After you,” which was when the commotion started, and the three men with the water hose showed up.