The Name of the World (2 page)

Myself, I continued as I had for years. I showed up where I was invited. I read a great deal in the library. I went to the movies by myself. I watched the skaters on the campus pond. Quite a bit more than I’d have liked it known, I held imaginary conversations with a man named Bill, in which I went over the same ground I’d been going over since the deaths of my wife and daughter. While I went around looking paralyzed
or detached, my thoughts ripped perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit.

Maybe this is why the young skaters looked so comfortable, even on the coldest days. In the daylight hours on what was called the Middle Campus, between the School of Law and the School of Social Sciences, from a dozen to as many as a hundred boys and girls glided around a pond with a tiny unscalable island in its center, a monolithic, rock island with a sculpture on its peak—red sheet-metal shapes—the pond marked off by a railing. Everybody skated around it in one direction. “Pond” may not be the right word. People told me it wasn’t eight inches deep. A reflecting pool, I’d guess; about twice the area of a football field. There were always a few wobbly beginners clinging to the rail, but for the most part these young students sat on the pond’s stone lip while they got on their skates, then stood up to take one long, expert stride onto an invisible carousel. It didn’t look like exercise. No rabbit eluded them. They went in an endless loop, but they weren’t after anything.

I often ate lunch in a cafeteria in the basement of the School of Law and then walked beside a bike path around the Middle Campus, stopping to watch the skaters until the chill forced me to start walking again, down past the pond and the Science Quad and over to the Museum of Art. And that’s what I happened to do on February 20, the fourth anniversary of the accident that took my family. I watched the skaters, and then went to see Bill, the man with whom I was so sociable, as I’ve mentioned, in fantasy.

The friendship was all in my mind, but Bill was not. I saw him once or twice a week. He worked in the Museum of Art. I often visited a particular drawing there, and Bill was the guard who generally stood near it, wearing blue pants and a white shirt with a breast tag bearing his name: W. Connors. I introduced myself once, and he told me his first name. A black man, somewhere in his late forties.

That I should be so affected by this drawing as to come around all the time, hungering at it, I thought might be understandable to a person who’d spent enough time in its presence to have been penetrated, similarly penetrated, maybe without the complicity of the artgoer, but penetrated anyway by its message. I felt a kinship with Bill—an illusory kinship, like the strange shocking wedding you experience with a figure who turns his face toward you as you flicker past in a train—to inhabit a frame for them, as they inhabit a frame for you—looking from either side of the same frame, I think you get it, in a moment that blinks on and blinks off, but never changes, a picture, in other words. Anyhow I liked thinking we shared something, each of us involved so much with what was going on in the same frame, Bill Connors and I.

This picture was an anonymous work that almost anybody on earth could have made, but as it happened, a Georgia slave had produced it. The work’s owners, the Stone family of Camden County, had found the work in the attic of the family’s old mansion. It was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand out
lines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I’ve said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.

To my way of thinking, this secret project of the nameless slave, whether man or woman we’ll never know, implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church’s grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments—implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.

Implicated. This wasn’t my reaction only. I talked with lots of people who’d seen this work, and they all felt the same, but in various ways, if that makes sense. They felt uneasy around it, challenged, disturbed. I suppose that’s what made it art, rather than drawing.

The piece wasn’t beautiful, particularly, unless you like looking at tree rings on a fresh stump, and not as engrossing or as mystifying, in fact, as a piece of wood. Natural entities, the clouds, the sea, these are four-dimensional, and so is the slab of wood, because it invites you to consider that each ring took a
year to make. The anonymous drawing was just a lot of sorrowful concentricity, but it spoke a truth. It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn’t go to “take it in.” I went to be convicted.

I can’t say I remember much about this particular visit to the museum. But I must have been troubled more than usual on this day, a bad anniversary, because I made the rest of it memorable by deciding to look up Heidi Franklin, the art historian with whom I’d hovered briefly in a capsule above the first few moments of this long winter, at Ted MacKey’s house, in the widow’s walk.

Whatever else I did in the museum that day, I must have had a wordless exchange with Bill in which we acknowledged one another perfunctorily and I wondered if he recognized me. Over these last four years he’d grown a mustache and acquired a chair in which he sat, these days, looking bored but not inattentive. Certainly not counting his money. Maybe he had a pension from the military, or some other stipend that made it possible to live on the wages of a rent-a-cop.

I nodded, I smiled. And so did Bill. I believed that at some juncture in his life Bill had made decisions he didn’t know at the time he was making—that had won him medals or by which he’d let his comrades down…I’m sure I imagined too much, but I saw an old war not quite faded in his eyes.

This was what our imaginary conversations—that is, forgive me,
my
imaginary conversations—often touched on. The indiscernible points, the little dimes, where fate takes its sharpest turns. I explained no more to him than I did to any
body else, but he spoke freely of his life after this thing that had happened, or hadn’t quite. Of how afterward he’d found it impossible to decide anything, or not to decide. How at a point in his journey out of mourning he’d wandered into a tunnel in which he traveled alone, and had no one to talk to, and couldn’t call out. Because of the consequences, the split-second consequences, everything he did or didn’t do became impossible.

And naturally, because I was talking to him in my head, the whole conversation was a monologue, and it was all about me. Exile, detachment, paralysis, fear—all the qualities people projected onto my flat white surface—they really played no part in anything that happened after the accident that took my wife and daughter. Everything occurred despite its complete impossibility. Including my decision, that day, to look for Heidi Franklin at the Art Department.

The doors to the Fine Arts Building lay directly across a paved court, almost a patio, that served the museum’s entrance, too. By walking over this pavement in the freezing weather, by stepping outside the routines I’d set for myself and going to see a woman, I wasn’t doing anything special, certainly not stirring my lifeless portions. I might have thought so three years earlier, when I’d still mistaken my paralysis for simple grief. But it wasn’t simple.

The day of the accident, our neighbor picked up Anne and Elsie, my wife and daughter, out front of our house, and made a U-turn heading for the highway. I stopped them with a wave and leaned down to the driver’s window. There’d been
an ice storm the night before. The streets were dangerous. I thought he should take the gravel shortcut to town, I thought he should stay off the fast roads. He’d been pointed toward the shortcut anyway, and now he’d turned around. “Aren’t you just heading on through to town?” “No, because of construction.” “It’s Sunday,” I told the old man, “they won’t be working.”

Everybody knew our neighbor, General Neally, retired many years from the Air Force (and, incidentally, a widower), as a vigorous, tennis-playing, memoir-writing Southern gentleman. But lately he’d been getting frail, I thought. Once when I watched him heading in his Cadillac out of his driveway and pausing to look right and left, right and left, and again right and left, more confused, it seemed, than cautious, I wondered if he should have been operating a car. Only a couple of weeks before the accident, the General and I had met one morning at our mailboxes and he’d invited me to his kitchen for coffee. As he puttered around after the makings he grew silent and scratched his head, turned around to face me, and said in absolute surprise, “What do you want!”

All this was on my mind as I stood beside his car, failing even to glance at my family on the other side of him—I remember that often: I might have looked one last time into their faces, but didn’t—and told the General, “Take the gravel road, it’s shorter.” “I like the big highway anyway,” he said. And drove off. I stood there with one last statement—“Take the gravel road. It’s safer”—on the tip of my tongue. On the tip of my tongue. I can still taste it in my mouth. If only I’d
said it. Even if he’d again rejected my advice, he’d have been delayed a few more seconds during the exchange, and maybe they’d all be alive today. During the next few terrible weeks, imagination served up other things I could have done. I might have kept them home, or called them a cab, or kept our own car out of the shop another few days—it was only in for a tune-up, because of the warranty. I might have kept a second car…but we didn’t need one, I commuted to the District each day in the Senator’s limousine. So I said nothing, and they drove away.

Five miles down the road the General came to a stop sign, applied his brakes, and floated over the ice into the path of a panel truck going forty miles an hour. (A truck from a florist’s shop. I don’t know—I didn’t view the scene—but I assume there were flowers everywhere.) At once Anne and Elsie were dead. The General survived for twenty-four hours, but never woke up. May they all rest in peace.

This winter day exactly four years later I went across the separating court, past the tarnished sculptures, through the doors of the Fine Arts Building. Went along through my tunnel, as I had for four years now. I took each step entirely out of a dull curiosity, not as to what waited ahead, because I didn’t care, but as to whether or not I could take one more step. I hadn’t found much else to interest me along the way. At the risk of stretching the illustration, I can say I sometimes came to turnings in the darkness and wondered if this were a labyrinth.

The Fine Arts Building was an old one, with high ceilings
that made the halls seem narrow and proportioned for some earlier, elongated race of academics. The place reeked of oils and glues and old wood. I didn’t expect Heidi to be in. I thought I’d end up leaving a message at the office. A young man with a stubbly goatee, the rest of his head hairless, seemed to be in charge there. When I asked for Heidi Franklin he ducked behind his desk and was gone, entirely gone. “Excuse me?” I called. I stepped closer and peered over the desk to find him bent low over the floor, fiddling with the plug to his electric typewriter. “She might be at the performance,” he said.

“Can I leave her a note?”

He stood up and I noticed a clever touch of style in his otherwise baggy contemporary apparel: a powder-blue Lacoste alligator shirt. Where the alligator patch belonged, the material was torn away and a small patch of his bare chest showed instead. A tiny alligator was tattooed there. “Try the Cannon Performance. Room Eight,” he said.

“Cannon Performance? Sounds dangerous.”

“I’m sure it’s meant to.”

I found Room Eight just a few steps down the hallway and peeked through the half-open door to see a number of students, say two dozen, most of them lounging on the floor, others perched on stools, all of them outfitted and decorated in the disheveled and expressive Art Department mode. Easels had been pushed aside and stools and chairs herded together. The large room was silent. But I couldn’t see any performance, no one performing, though most of the front of the room lay visible to me. I stepped in quietly and sat at a wooden school
desk by the entrance, more a part of the miscellany, the drop cloths and easels and boxes, than of the audience. Now I could see the room’s near corner, and on a small platform a woman perched on a table with her legs widely parted, her left foot up beside her and the right one dangling, a young woman, nude below the waist except for her shoes—black tennies, high-top, unlaced, one lace purple or darkish and the other white or gray—engaged in shaving her lathered mons veneris. She used a pink disposable safety razor. I sat close enough to see these facts and colors. She was having some trouble with this operation, making very short strokes of her razor, swishing it vigorously in a chipped enamel bowl of water after every couple of strokes, and changing razors frequently from a plastic package full of them.

It took me a bit to recognize the young woman I’d met at Ted MacKey’s the same night I’d met Heidi Franklin, that is, the tipsy cellist in the blue velvet dress. I tried to stay with the conventionally visible facts: She had red hair, pretty blue eyes, the faint violet circles around them more pronounced because of her complexion’s paleness. At the moment she wore a yellow baseball cap and a blue T-shirt that said
Edgars
in white cursive letters across the breast.

I’d meant to sit out of the way, but as the dais was tucked into this corner, my corner, where I hadn’t expected to find it, I was very nearly in the lap of the performer. Did freckles wander over her knees? As I leaned forward to see, I caught myself, terribly embarrassed. But nobody was looking at me. The students attended carefully, like the audience in an operating
theater, with a collective attitude that seemed clinical if not outright jaded: She was an artist, that’s all. I couldn’t imagine why they called this a Cannon Performance.