The Paper Dragon (52 page)

"Did you ask Colonel Hamilton about the 105th Division?"

"No."

"You asked him about the
Chinese
divisions involved in the Ch'ongch'on River offensive, did you not?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"For the sake of accuracy."

"You wanted the exact designations for those divisions?"

"Yes."

"Yet you designated your American division the 105th, and did not think of checking its authenticity with the colonel."

"There was no need to do that. I knew the division was fictitious."

"How did you know?"

"Because I knew which American divisions were involved in the battle."

"You trusted your memory concerning those divisions?"

"Yes."

"But you did not trust your memory concerning the stripping of a rifle."

"For the last time, the scene was built on a juxtaposition of sexual allusions to absolutely technical language. Its effectiveness was based on the accuracy of the technical detail. Which is why I consulted Colonel Hamilton."

"And the battle scenes? Was their effectiveness based on accuracy of detail?"

"Yes."

"So that it was essential to give the Chinese armies their proper designations?"

"And their strength. The climactic chapter in the book is the one in which the patrol moves up on an overwhelming force of Chinese."

"Did you use an actual division number for the Chinese force in that scene?"

"Yes, I did."

"And you checked this number with Colonel Hamilton?"

"He gave me the division designation, and also its estimated strength."

"Information from Army files?"

"Yes."

"You did not check the 105th Division with him?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I told you. I knew it was fictitious. I knew I had invented it."

"
How
did you invent it?"

"I don't know."

"Well now, Mr. Driscoll, you seem to have a detailed record of every other piece of information that went into your novel, you have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, and you have expanded outlines, and you have target dates and notes to yourself, and yet you can't remember how you happened to invent the 105th Division. Did it simply come to you out of the blue?"

"I don't know."

"Try to remember, Mr. Driscoll. Was the 105th a sudden inspiration?"

"Nothing about the book was a sudden inspiration."

"In that case, you must have pondered the designation for a long time before you decided on its use."

"No."

"Did you ponder it for a short time?"

"I didn't ponder it at all. I simply used it."

"But where did it come from?"

"It did
not
come from Mr. Constantine's play."

"I am not asking you where it did
not
come from. I am asking you exactly where it
did
come from, Mr. Driscoll, and I would like an answer."

"I don't know."

"Is that your answer?"

"That is my answer."

"I have no further questions, your Honor."

"Mr. Willow?"

"No questions."

"Thank you, Mr. Driscoll."

"Thank you," Driscoll said, and rose from the stand. He looked out over the courtroom for a moment, and then went to take a seat in the jury box alongside his wife.

"Is there any further evidence?" McIntyre asked.

"No, your Honor," Willow said. "That is all for the defendant Mitchell-Campbell."

"Your Honor," Genitori said, rising, "the contract between API and James Driscoll, dated August 16, 1963, contains the indemnity clause favoring API, and is annexed as Exhibit A to our answer and crossclaim. May it be deemed to have been submitted in evidence?"

"No objection," Willow said.

"Fine," McIntyre said. "Is there any further evidence to be offered by either side?"

"The plaintiff rests," Brackman said.

"Your Honor, may I at this time renew our motion to dismiss on the ground that no cause has been made?"

"I assume, Mr. Willow, that you will want to argue this motion as well as the merits of the alleged similarities, won't you?"

"Yes, your Honor."

"I hope, too, that both sides will be submitting proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law."

"Yes, sir."

"We will, sir."

"Well, it's almost four o'clock now, gentlemen, but perhaps we can be ready to do that tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I'll reserve any further comments and rulings until then."

"May we consider the case closed for all other purposes, your Honor?" Brackman asked.

"Yes," McIntyre said. "The case is closed for all purposes other than the submission of conclusions of law, findings of fact, and argument."

They take you back, Driscoll thought, they force you to go back to a time and place forgotten or at least deliberately obscured. It is instant therapy, it is crash analysis, this confrontation with yourself, an odd meeting with a seeming stranger who moves steadily closer until you recognize him with a start — he is you, but he is no longer you. Comparisons are odious, the man said, I forget which man. But what were they doing to me today if not forcing me to resurrect my youth (upon whom was Sergeant Morley based?) and then moving by logical if tedious progression into my so-called maturity (when exactly did you begin writing your book, Mr. Driscoll?) until they had brought the biography to date, into my dotage, my slow if clinging expiration (you are a novelist, are you not, Mr. Driscoll? No, I am a Vermont farmer).

The farm in Vermont is the here and now, the present. It was purchased for eight thousand dollars, a portion of my share of the movie money on
The Paper Dragon
. The farmhouse is red, you approach it over a rutted, ice-covered road in the winter; in the spring, the road is running and wet, soggy and mired. There is a falling stone wall bordering the property, said to have been built by colonial settlers, which theory I personally buy since there are still enough boulders firmly enbedded in the two acres of arable land to construct yet another wall from there to Boston and back. I pretend to grow forage crops there, alfalfa and hay and oats.

It is interesting, don't you think, that were I a novelist, were I truly a working novelist, my daily routine would be concerned primarily with seeking truth in terms of fabrication, the enlargement of fantasy, the exercise of imagination, a pretense hardly less energetic than that of being a Vermont farmer, which I am not, but which I purport to be.

I do not know what I am.

I have not known what or who I am for a very long time now, I thank
you
for that, darling.

We go to bed early in Vermont because a farmer, I am informed, must rise to take care of this and that, sowing, reaping, harvesting, breathing deep of clear Vermont air, ahhh, the outdoor life, rise and shine at five-thirty a.m., walk with springing step to the barn where Ebie begins her chores with the chickens. Yes, we have chickens, did I neglect to tell you that, Mr. Brackman? We have seventy-two chickens. We bought those with the movie money, too. So it is early to bed in Vermont, and since the bed part is never very good or very interesting anyway, it's really not too terribly difficult to throw back the covers before dawn and touch the cold wooden floor, scarcely colder than the bed in which Mr. and Mrs. James Driscoll lie, though we do sometimes make love. We he in love, so to speak.

Stay, she used to say, why must you go home? But go I would. I still don't know why. Perhaps there was in me, at eighteen, more of my mother than I imagined there was, the humorless woman wearing her black shawl. How could I explain to flfer that I was deliriously in love with a girl in Brooklyn and that all I wanted to do was hold her and touch her and look at her and love her day and night? How could I explain with the sound of Holy Mary, Mother of God coming from her bedroom each night, as if she were doing penance for God knew what mortal sin, every night, Holy Mary, Mother of God. While I thought of Ebie lying alone in that large bed on Myrtle Avenue, waiting for the next afternoon when I would taste her once again — that is the distant past, that is the far distant past. The present is Vermont, and a love-making that is only necessary, a biological release for both of us. We have not spoken the words "I love you" in so long I think if I heard them said or uttered them myself, I would begin to weep. We perform mechanically, we lie in love, my Southern flower and myself, remembering a past when all was fire and death, "the little death" the ancients called it, was that Hemingway? Did you feel the earth move? Yes,
guapa
. Truly? Yes, truly. You old bewitcher, you seduced a generation.

The distant past. Long before the red Vermont farmhouse I insisted on buying, half hoping she would refuse to come with me, half hoping she would pull out at last, abandon the marriage, end the loveless grappling, but no. Not Ebie, not that determined Southern flower. She had made the vows, oh my yes, and she would honor them, come crumbling wall or overflowing spring, rutted roads or bone-chilling winter. And how are you today, Mrs. Driscoll? the Vermont ladies all say, and she answers with a pert nod of her head and tells them about the pies she has baked, or asks their opinion on how to rid the house of flies. There are a dreadful number of flies in the house all the time, she says to Mrs. Dimmity, who is our next-door neighbor in the gray farmhouse across the road. Mrs. Dimmity does part-time housework for the skiers who rent the old Kruger place. They are a noisy lot, college boys and girls who speed along the black road at midnight every winter Friday, racing over the dangerous ice. I visualize them booming mountains in the daytime, shagging themselves into exhaustion each night. They bring the past into our fake present. I saw one of them one cold forbidding morning, she was blond and tall, so young, she wore a black parka and black stretch pants, she raised her mittened hand to greet me in the frosty dawn as I came out of the barn. I returned the wave, my heart was pounding.

The exterminator has visited us some five times already, but he cannot rid the house of mice. I cannot bear the thought of them scurrying in the night, scarcely secret sharers of our roof. They are the final insult, the final invasion of a marriage that certainly needs no further intruders. I visualize them nibbling at the wallboard, or licking the wallpaper paste, undermining the rotting original timbers of the old house until one day it will fall down upon our ears and a great cloud of mice dirt will rise on the air, and they will run, they will scatter away from the crumbling ruin, chattering and squeaking in triumph, having destroyed it at last, having destroyed even the meager shaky structure that has managed to survive until now.

It seemed so strong, it seemed so indestructible.

In the past, the distant past — and this goes back, my child, to a time when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron, all the way back at least to 1948, do you remember the blizzard that January? It was centuries ago. It was the time of the Great Brooklyn Renaissance, perhaps you may recall the legend of the Uncertain Knight who rode out of West End Avenue carrying a black tin watercolor box under his arm, coming into the Valley of Pratt where he met the Lady Edna Belle. My Ebie's hair is like a golden helmet/Poured molten, shaped to fit/Haphazardly/And yet despite — the ode ended there, because there were no words. Not then. Not as yet. No words to express what I felt for Ebie, the incredible awakening I knew in her arms and, yes, between her legs. Yes, that was a very real part of it, it
had
to be, I had known only one other girl before Ebie — Liz McPherson, known to every young and budding Studs Lonigan along 96th Street. She lived near Lexington Avenue, but the crosstown walk never fazed any of us, through the park's transverse path and over the hill to grandmother's house we went, grandmother being Liz who shared a room with her baby sister. The infant would lie asleep in her crib beside Liz's narrow bed where we made fitfully inexperienced love, with sometimes two or more other young bucks waiting outside the closed door in the tenement kitchen. Poor Liz, I wonder what ever became of her; Liz the Whore, we ungallantly called her.

When Ebie told me about the boy who limped, I was furious at first. I conjured the image of a Brooklyn Liz, far removed from 96th Street, but sisters under the skin, a long line of cock-in-hand suitors outside her apartment door. Donald was his name,
had
been his name; apparently the affair had run its course several months before we met in Bertie's,
l'affaire de sa jeunesse
: emblazon the motto on a field argent, two bronze balls pendant beneath a sinister hand couped at the wrist, holding erect a cane. I went to church the day she told me, I had not been inside a confessional since I was fifteen, and I was there to confess not my own sin, but the sin of a girl I deeply loved, or thought I loved, a girl who had become in six short months — this was May of 1948, I can still remember the day, bright with spring sunshine, a bird chirping incessantly in the budding tree just outside the stained glass window above the confession box,
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned
— a girl who had become in half a year my only reason for existence.

The priest spoke with a faint Italian accent, there was in his voice the echo of an ancient race, but in his words there was no wisdom. I left the church unsatisfied, the bird still chirping its inane song, the sun bright in an opaque sky, I could not understand why she had not waited for me to come along, why she had foolishly given herself to this boy who limped. I tried to tell Uncle Benny about it that night, the telephone beckoning, knowing that Ebie was waiting for my call in her Myrtle Avenue apartment, or at least
hoping
she was waiting. But I couldn't tell him. I sat there in the living room with him, we were both sitting on the piano bench, side by side, our hands separately clasped and hanging between our respective knees, like two old men in the park, staring solemnly at pigeons. But I could not tell him that the girl I loved had been living with some goddamn cripple for five months, how could I tell this to Uncle Benny or to
anyone
, for that matter? So we talked about my studies, Uncle Benny was always fascinated by the
theory
of art, and I told him I was having trouble with one of my instructors, I was sure the man disliked me, and Uncle Benny told me there would be instructors all through my life who took a dim view of me, or vice versa, and the thing to do with them was simply face the fact that it would be difficult, but to do my best, do my work the best way I knew how, and get through it somehow, that was the important thing. And we sat there on the piano bench with the question of Ebie hanging on the air, unresolved, unspoken. I nodded and said, Yeah, but Uncle Benny this guy is a real son of a bitch, and Uncle Benny said, That only means you've got to work harder, Jimbo, you've got to get what you can out of the course,
despite
the way he feels about you, you've got to rely on what's inside
yourself
, Jimbo, there's lots of good stuff inside you. Yeah, I said, and nodded. Sure, Uncle Benny said, and nodded. After a while, I got up and thanked him, and went into my room. I could hear my mother in her bedroom next door, already beginning the litany of Hello Mary, Mother of God. I threw myself down on the bed, and tried to figure out what I should do. I decided two things. First, I decided I could never let go of Ebie Dearborn because I loved her too much, and second, I decided I would extract from her a promise that Donald Who Limped was to be the last of her little adventures, that James Randolph Driscoll was now on the scene having ridden long and hard from West End Avenue, and he was on the scene to
stay
, and she had better get that through her golden-helmet head. I was still furious when I told it to her in the curtain-rustling stillness of her bedroom later that night. She sat in a straight-backed chair near the window, the curtains stirring behind her with each fresh spring breeze, unsmiling, sitting as straight-backed as the chair. When I was through, she started to say something but the goddamn elevated express roared by and we were caught in a moment of mechanical suspense, waiting for the train to pass, waiting for the room to be still again.

In a sense, that day in 1948 was the beginning. Oh yes, Norman Sheppard said only this afternoon that there are no endings in life, and perhaps he was right, perhaps there are no beginnings as well — but for me, it was a beginning, and I think it was for Ebie, too. For me, for us, it was the start of a gradual loss of identity. If the love we made was a little death, then the love we knew was a littler death still, this loss of self, this certain overlapping of person upon person, blending, merging, no longer Ebie and no longer me, a single unit responding and reacting in rare empathy, osmotically perhaps, or perhaps symbiotically because, yes, we surely fed upon each other and sustained each other and became each other, inseparable, indistinguishable, one.

Who can remember, can
I
remember, any of my own responses as apart from Ebie's? Reconstruct all of the events that led to our marriage in 1950, arrange them in sequence and what can I remember that does not include Ebie? Once I walked alone in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge and wrote in my head a suspense story for Alfred Hitchcock, spies chasing counterspies over wet cobblestones and under dripping metal cross-supports, but the heroine of that movie (running through the rain, blond hair stringy and wet, head snapping back over her shoulder to steal a quick glance at God knew what awful pursuer) was Ebie Dearborn, all was Ebie Dearborn. And once I sat alone in the living room of the West End Avenue apartment, the winter afternoon waning, and tapped out a melody on the old Chickering, note by faltering note, using only one hand, but the symphony was Ebie Dearborn, all was Ebie Dearborn. You were wrong, Norman Sheppard; there are beginnings, and there are endings as well, and I have known them both. I can remember the day our Fainting in Coils instructor (Lewis Carroll's chapter was big with the students at Pratt, who quite rightfully thought of themselves as very
inside
concerning art and the art world and things artistic) took us to see the bona fide studio of a bona fide artist named Bernardo Casamorte, whose name we later learned meant "house of the dead," hilariously inappropriate after what we had seen. Casamorte lived on West 18th Street in a skylighted loft that had once been a hat factory. Hat molds, some of which he had decorated with grinning faces, most of which he had left unadorned, still rested on every flat surface in the place, cluttering the room. In order to stand or sit, the class — there were thirty of us — had to move molds, or easels, or finished and unfinished canvases, or palettes, or pots of paint and glue, or soiled clothing draped or tossed or hanging, or the remains of breakfast. There were seven cats in the place, and a large boxer who had dipped his snout in vermilion, and who gave the appearance of a comic strip drunk with illuminated nose. There was also a mistress-model who slunk around the loft in an electric-blue silk dressing gown while Casamorte gave us his lecture on what it was like to earn a living as a painter, a premise we seriously doubted on the evidence presented. We kept hoping the mistress-model would do a little posing for him while we were there; she was a dark brunette with enormous breasts swelling the gown; she held the gown closed with her folded arms, its sash having been misplaced in the general disorder of the joint. We decided afterwards, Ebie and I, that the loft was in reality a stage set designed and built by Pratt, and that Casamorte, his busty model-mistress, his seven cats, and his drunken boxer were all actors hired by the school for this special outing each year. This was the only class Ebie and I shared together, by dispensation, since she was a full year ahead of me. She was much better in oils than I was, I never could get the hang of oils. She had a fine sure touch with pigment, she really might have become a good artist if she'd stuck with it. In Vermont now, even in Vermont where she has all the time in the world, she never paints anymore. Never. It is as if everything in
her
has gone dead as well.