Little Reef and Other Stories Page 3
“Who’ve I been dying to see and meet?” Trailer said when he answered the door.
His place wasn’t small, but it was crammed with enough antiques for a mansion.
We started in the salon, he called it. He’d been sending me his clippings, a couple at a time, always what I had already read in the paper, each with a funny note clipped on. “Like to know what you think of this,” it said on a lined sheet torn from a small spiral notebook. I had learned the ironic use of the word “inexplicably” from a theater review of his: “Inexplicably, Ms. Mann’s Annie Oakley resembles a rather bedraggled, chiffon-bedizened Cyndi Lauper.”
He was holding a tall glass of black liquid and said, “Can I get you a cold Coca-Cola?”
“Oh God, thank you. Can I help? I meant, may I?”
“You may not. You are in fact strictly, and under pain of lashings, expressly forbidden.”
He took his drink to the kitchen and carried it back, refreshed, along with my iced Coke.
I said, “I’d like to thank you for the clippings. I don’t know a lot about classical music.”
He said carefully, “You simply expose yourself, bit by bit, is merely all.”
“Go and listen, absorb?”
“That’s it. It’s the only way we learn anything, by going back and back into it.”
“Obviously. We did go to a lot of symphonies—well, not a lot— back in gifted.”
“What is this ‘gifted’?” he said, narrowing his eyes, as though he’d heard about it but never had it fully and properly and satisfactorily explained to him.
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound sophisticated, “this thing where we learned cultural stuff.”
“Have made available to you all of the cultural outlets Jacksonville has to offer?”
He smacked his lips getting me stiffly in his sights and pursed his mouth tartly.
“Yes. And like in ninth grade, we made this movie, to learn how to collaborate.”
I was embarrassed about it and wished I’d shut up sooner. I was nervous. The phone rang and he reached for the princess extension next to the wicker rocker he sat in.
He picked it up but before replying into it asked me, “Do you like hamburgers?”
“Absolutely. Are we having hamburgers?”
He nodded rapidly with a boyish flare in his eyes.
“Hello, dear heart?” he greeted the party.
I studied the wall, thinking it would be rude if it looked like I was eavesdropping. In the corner was a bust of a woman on its own dark wooden stand with half of her face gone.
He glanced at me and said, “Add cheese?”
“Cheese, please.”
“Cheese all around.” He winked at me. “Oh, those are yummy. Coupla those, too.”
When he hung up he said, “I can’t wait for you to meet my friend Maxy.”
“Was that Maxy?”
“That was my friend Carl, about the burgers. Carl’s sometimes wont to fetch supper.”
We heard a key in the door and in came Maxy. She was redheaded with a wavy perm and was in a stylish yellow tracksuit and clean white sneakers. We both stood up.
“Matthew. Matthew,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I read your story and loved it. But how did you do it? Get into that girl’s head, know what she was thinking?”
“It was that good?” I said.
She got an appalled look, panning it around at Trailer. “More than that, but George!”
I thanked her and said to her shoulder, “I just sort of got inspired and wrote it.”
“Meaning you didn’t plagiarize?” Trailer said, mugging theatrically, a hand on a hip.
Still with the look, she turned back. “‘Just sort of wrote it.’ What was your inspiration?”
“I’m not sure. People get abortions and nobody wants to talk about them.”
Trailer said, “And they’re not getting any more talkative about them—the way things are headed. No, I can nearly guarantee you that. But darling, just before you came in Matthew was telling me about a movie he and his gifted classmates made in, what was it, ninth grade? Junior high, and making a movie. Be honest, Maxy, have you ever heard of the gifted track?”
Maxy fretted, saying, “What rock have you been living under, George? Everyone on the entire planet’s heard of gifted. My niece is in gifted, in Spartanburg—it’s extremely common.”
“Which niece?”
“Brittany, my brother Barney’s girl.”
“How is Barney?”
“Well, recall you’ve met him. Barney’ll never reach his full potential, not with her.”
Trailer looked back at me and said, “Cream o’ Wheat’s my lifeline, my rock. We share all but blood cells. But let’s move now. I’m afraid the dining room is impractical for eating in. You can’t see the top of the table, what with these stacks of papers and boxes and books: half a ton of reference volumes alone. But I work constantly, which is why I’m so foolishly out of touch with the wider world. I haven’t offered you a thing to imbibe, Cream-o.”
“I noticed that, too, Jingles.”
“Would you like a cold Co’-Cola? Doesn’t that sound lip-smacking?”
“I would expire without one.”
“I’m afraid, Matthew, that in order to relocate we have to pass through the kitchen in its miserable, hovel-like shape. There’s no alternative. Thus it would behoove you not to cast your eyes about, neither left nor right, as we quickly traverse. Eyes ever forward …”
Passing through, I glimpsed on the right the liquor bottles gleaming under the concealed fluorescent strip. To the left next to the sink was a half-drunk bottle of dark Bacardi rum.
“Matt, go in there and look at my Schiavelli drawing—and tell me is it not exquisite, and let me know if I should move it to where we might behold the thing to even greater advantage.”
It was a woman’s hand, the pencil lines half-faded. The light was dim. You had to look closely. It tilted slightly up, languidly reaching, each finger fanned at a slightly different angle.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, getting closer and squinting at the details.
Trailer called from the kitchen, “Oh Matt, I was just acting silly and thick a while ago.”
“We tease a lot,” said Maxy, coming and standing next to me. “George’s people have been passing this down forever. Now, I love how she holds her finger out for her ring. It’s just a sketch, a study. For a detail, I gather. I don’t know a lot about art, either, Matthew.”
Trailer came in and said, “Don’t do it, lady! You’ll regret it till the day you die!”
“Did you get that part?” said Maxy to me. “I didn’t. I just thought it was a nice hand.”
“Plain old garden-variety Renaissance-era bride’s paw,” Trailer announced. He went to a love seat on the far end of the room and fluffed a throw pillow for back support and eased down.
I waited for Maxy to sit on the bigger sofa, then joined her, and she touched my knee and smiled, blinking, and said, “George is from a very prominent family in Charleston.”
“From my mother’s side, yet with nothing in the world but what you behold here, now.”
“Are taste and comportment so absolute zero?” said Maxy. “Well, for my part that is not what I’ve been hearing for the longest time. We’re from just up the road from each other.”
“My father, on the other hand, was from nothing and clawed his way up using only the sweat off his brow—stop me if you’ve heard this one—and I do believe I quite favor him.”
“Jingles, come on now. Lord. And nothing whatsoever from Nadine’s line?”
“Wrong side of the tracks, I’ve always felt to be,” he said, nose in the air. “Despite all.”
Maxy laughed wickedly: “And with only that much, and yet thank God for me!”
They leaned out to each other from their separate places, trying not to splosh their drinks, and clenched hands firmly then shook them mightily, once, twice, covertly like old teammates.
“Cream o’ Wheat.”
“Jingles.”
I heard Bach piano music tinkling and cascading low a room away. I said, “Working in the same building and writing for the newspaper, you must know Hunter B. Gwathmey?”
About to take a sip, Trailer quickly said, “Oh, her!”
Maxy cautioned, “George.”
“Okay, not another word about Miz Hunter B. But just to say, what an awful pity, what a distinct and terrible shame, the way they’ve let that Pelican Hotel go to seed, accepting trash. It’s become a boardinghouse, and you know what they’ll do with the woodwork and plaster, all those murals and frescoes, every bit of it peeling and dying—well, they will tear it down. They do that here, to people and things. They let everyone and everything fall apart, then draw the curtain.”
Carl came with our cheeseburgers. Rugged, athletic, good-looking, youngish, he flushed red when we were introduced and made to bow at me but without making eye contact. He wore a knit cap that looked squashed on, like from New England or Canada, with woolly pompom tassels hanging by each ear touching his neck in the Florida heat when he glanced robotically about.
We sat around with our burgers on china. I wadded up my wrappings, putting them in the paper bag by my feet. I opened little packets of ketchup and squirted it on my onion rings, trying to concentrate on the piano solo, then a symphony coming in or something else orchestral.
We discussed the currently playing Annie Get Your Gun. Already it seemed that my time here was about to run out. I waited for my chance to bolt. Carl asked Trailer about his Saturday, and Trailer said that he had to run out to the beach that night for The Merchant of Venice.
“I normally wouldn’t bother. Del Bixby has been doing the most boffo, insane inanities with costumes—fascist military uniforms— and laying this punk music over on top of it. Yuck.”
Carl licked the last bits of juicy burger from his palm and pronounced, “But it’s chic.”
“Whatever you call it,” said Trailer and guffawed, eyes not straying from Carl.
“George,” I said, “do you think I should go to journalism school? Did you?”
“Not on your life, on either count,” he replied. “What can they teach you? How to run the photocopier? If you can type and have half a brain, you can do what I do. But don’t do what I do, it’s a dying form. I promise thee. Go into computers—whatever else floats your boat.”
I said what I’d rehearsed: “But to me, nothing made is as good as something created.”
It got quiet except for the twiddly-hop, twiddly-hop of woodwinds and strings.
“Amen,” said Maxy.
Trailer said, “That’s pretty good, isn’t it? Is that from something, a text, Matthew?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I don’t think I unconsciously stole it from anyone.”
“Well, it’s pretty good. Wouldn’t you say that’s well put, Cream o’ Wheat?”
“It’s lovely,” said Maxy, smiling at me like before: a sad smile, it occurred to me.
We surrendered our china and greasy wrappings, then Trailer and Carl took it all into the kitchen. I didn’t like being alone with Maxy now. I wanted to fall asleep on the sofa, knowing I might look cute to Carl and Trailer if they came in and found me later.
“Are your folks and all of your people originally from around here?” Maxy asked.
In the kitchen, Carl screamed, “All right, all right already. Jesus Fucking Christ.”
We could just hear Trailer hissing, “Don’t get that tone with me, you.”
I cleared my throat and replied to Maxy, “We’re from Tennessee originally.”
“Tennessee, half my family’s from Nashville! But which part of Tennessee’s yours?”
“Of all the nitwittedness,” yelled Trailer, “I have flat forgotten about dessert!”
“Oh honey, who cares?” Maxy hollered back in to him. “Next time. No big deal.”
“Well,” he then said, reappearing, hands clasped in front like a deacon’s itching for the collection plate to home back. “Dear heart, before you have to run I have a gift for you.”
“Oh.” I stood up. “This has been so much fun, folks—so interesting, and a lot of fun!”
He took me back through the kitchen, where Carl was leaning over the sink with a sponge scrubbing at the china under a steaming tap, wool beanie still on. Carl got me in the corner of his eye, stood upright, and turned to me holding up his sudsy, reddened hands without drying them.
“Sorry, Matt. Good to meet you, man, anyway.”
In the front salon, Trailer took a book from the top of the piano and said, “For you.”
It was Music for Chameleons, with the original metallic-lavender cover.
I said, “Oh, how nice. Thanks. But hey, I’ve already read this, actually.”
“This is a first edition, kid. Hang on to it and it’ll be worth something to you someday.”
We went outside together and he said, “Put it in your car then we’ll take a little walk.”
It had been a humid day and there was a chill in the air and fog was forming. He led me onto a street I didn’t know and I said, “Those oaks look like crouching old men.”
He said, “A quick, excellent description. Bravo.”
“They look livid and wild, with their arms in the air, ready to scream.”
“Let’s not go overboard.”
We walked on a ways and I wondered about everything. Would I be famous?
Trailer took his time and finally said, “You know, Matthew, we cannot be friends.”
I wanted to hug him and thank him, but part of me was too proud. I was confused.
“The world is fiercely stupid,” he said. “Folks get the wrong idea, really so stupid …”
“I know,” I said emptily, “they’re so stupid. People are morons.”
“You’re not listening,” he said. “I feel like you could become a better listener, Matthew.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and turned me a hundred and eighty degrees toward him, and I said, “Sorry, rewind. What did you mean just now? I was off in my own world.”
“I know, dear heart,” he said, frowning, then laughed like an old friend saying goodbye.
But it was true. I never saw George Trailer again, either.
referred pain
She was married to a man who was extremely popular with his students. The English department had even allowed Gary to choose the title for his own chair, which he’d named after an antiquarian bookseller in Gary’s native New York who’d closed his doors a while ago. Gary collected all the old avant-garde editions, mostly mealy paperbacks smelling of must and mold, the old Grove and New Directions and Olympia Press originals, and stored them in glass cases in a room that in other households might have been reserved for baby’s nursery. Gary had been inspired by Beckett, Ionesco, and his mentor John Hawkes, and in his own writing was content to frustrate readers with lyrical repetitions, lack of scene-setting detail, and characters he called “X.”
People didn’t read Gary’s novels so much as talk about them. He brought them in at the rate of one every two or three years. They were brief and he did most of his work on them in the farmhouse they rented for a couple months every summer in the South of France. It was her idea to have his grad students over a few times a semester. Gary was so self-contained that he didn’t seem to need them or Diane or anyone else around, although Gary never seemed rattled by their company, either. Diane kept the house clean and cooked for him, and when he came home from the university Gary smiled at the neatness of things, and when he sat down to one of her meals he thanked her pleasantly and complimented whatever she’d bothered making, his fond, far-off look never wavering. She remembered the shy Gary she’d met at Columbia thirty years ago, compact and smooth-skinned, his well-formed body an unblemished envelope of unimposing masculinity. After only a year of dating she’d inadvertently pro
posed to him in his room one night when she’d said, “Do you think this is leading to anything permanent? But if that’s dumb, you can just say.”
“Well for goodness sake, Di,” Gary had then said, getting an alarmed look that he quickly swapped for a clever, sage gleam, “and how long has this been going through your mind?”
She’d read all of Trollope, then all of Dickens, and by now all of nearly everyone, trying to find distractions. She kept the garden going and mowed the lawn herself. The only thing she wouldn’t paint was exterior trim. For a long time she had felt like she owed Gary this much, but she didn’t find any of the work she did around the house too great a challenge. She didn’t have a job, and this had been a mistake, and sometimes while he slept without snoring too loudly she sat up in the living room, like a Joni Mitchell persona, she thought, the speaker or narrator in a Joni Mitchell song from the mid-seventies specifically, and drank wine and wished she could ask one of Gary’s students how to get ahold of some grass. She’d liked smoking grass, only having lied to Gary when she was helping him through grad school up at Brown by telling him she didn’t see the point of grass. She’d always wanted to be alert for him. At any minute he’d ask her to listen to something he’d written—not his own creative work, just the dull seminar papers he didn’t care anything about. He’d usually liked her suggestions. His main thing was to be clear and go for a decent grade, though he didn’t really care about his literature courses. Gary was confident about his fiction, and she left that alone. Once, here, trimming the ivy that had gotten shaggy along the front of the house, she’d fallen off the ladder. He’d heard her impact on the lawn—somehow she managed to fall flat and not break anything—and Gary had come running outside then driven her to the emergency room. When she was released after a couple of hours, the X-rays a thumbs-up, he’d put her to bed and stayed close to her the entire weekend, returning regularly to her from the desk in his study and darting in and out of their room to heat up soup and fix sandwiches and administer Tylenol. He needed her to need him, she’d decided. “To need to be needed,” she was saying now to Taylor, a pretty, very promising-seeming girl from Maine with sunny features.