The Lacuna

The thing was boggling. He mentioned other possibilities. Using a ghostwriter. Not exactly that, but a real person, I would pay him a fee to use his name. In case I am worried about the press uncovering that the book was actually written by me.

Uncovering. My words, me, how could there be any difference?

“You’re an editor, Mr. Barnes. Your stock-in-trade is the handiwork of other people. So this could be Stanback Powders we’re discussing, or fine leather shoes, as far as you’re concerned. I don’t know, I’m only guessing. But for me it is different. I am the tongue of the shoe. If you pull me out of it, the whole thing falls apart.”

April 8

A day could be perfect. You could forget fear altogether. Or fear might no longer make any difference, because it is the whole ocean and you’re in it. You hold your breath, swim for light.

Tommy found it hilarious that Barnes had to be talked into putting my name on my book. Or that he would at least “pitch that idea to marketing.” A freaking gasser. Somehow I was persuaded to agree. Tommy is persuasive.

“Oh my God, pitch that to marketing. Author’s name on the author’s book, what next?”

God has no better card to play than an April day, a well-tuned car, a world with nothing so wrong in it really, if a lomo adobado could still be cooked to such perfection, consumed to excess, distributed thereafter between a working Philco refrigerator and two happy, useless cats. And all of it left behind, dishes still in the sink. The mountain parkway is open to the west now, a skyline viaduct to the Great Smokies, they finished it just for us. Tommy and me. We were quite sure of that. The tunnels are no longer blind, they all go somewhere. You arrive at the other side.

“Mr. Barnes seemed to think he was taking a terrible risk on me. I’m a regular Moriarty, my menace looms large. He said, ‘I just hope I won’t be sorry about this.’”

“Oh, you devil,” Tommy said. “Wanting your name on your book. Next thing you know they’ll be calling a spade a spade.”

“Calling a rake a rake,” I proposed, opening the Roadster full throttle on the parkway, letting the curves pull us, feeling their outbound gravity. The world blurred, the April trees lit up with pale green flames, scenes flashed by, falling water, swinging bridges strung across rocky ravines. Windows wide open, the full breath of spring of dirt of new life stirring in the breast of whatever was left for dead, all that rushed at us now. Tommy’s hair shuddered golden in the wind. He is a rake, a rake, the blinding shine of him reflected in the windscreen, Tommy’s glint and glory. Tommy’s hand laid here and there as if it hardly mattered, making me want to wreck the car. To find speed, drive myself deep into it.

“You and me, cat, this is the life,” he said, and with Tommy that’s as near as it gets to the terms of affection. “This is the life and you know it.”

Loose pages, Montford

June 1949—January 1950
(VB)

When the FBI called on Mrs. Brown, that was the alarm bell gone off. That was the waking up. How stupid I have been. I’d failed to expect it, the FBI going to see her at Mrs. Bittle’s. So I knew then, burn everything. It was May 10 or 11, the burning. They’d come on the evening of May 4, she said, not a forgettable date, and she went a week without telling me. I didn’t expect that either. It wasn’t Myers but two other men, looking for anything she could think of. Not only during our acquaintance, they told her, but anything she might know about my past. Tax avoidance, girlfriend troubles.

Well, I hope you told them. I have the worst trouble finding any girlfriends.

She would not let me make it into a joke. They offered to give her money if she thought of something. They mentioned five thousand dollars. She asked if I had any idea what kind of money that is. I said, “Do you think I don’t?” We were sitting at the green table in the kitchen, it was after we’d taken to eating lunch there together because she doesn’t like going to the luncheonettes now. I fixed her a pork sandwich that day. It was raining. No, not raining, because later she would be out in the back, that fire roaring.

What I remember plainly is how she bit the sandwich, set it down, chewed, bit again. Nearly choking, the whole time. I was sorry I’d made the sandwich, she was obviously not hungry but now would feel obligated to eat. In Mexico she looked at every piece of embroidery that any barefoot mother held up to her. Not just pretending, really examining the stitches with full appreciation. She can’t dissemble to save her life.

That is why, when I asked why she wasn’t hungry, she told me the reason. She really had not wanted to bother me about the FBI men who came to see her at Mrs. Bittle’s. Not to worry me. Five thousand dollars. For the first time I began to understand what a danger I pose to her. I have been so thick, so naive.

She said she felt covered with dirt with those two men there. Mrs. Bittle dusting every sill in the parlor, trying to hear. I could picture that, and Mrs. Brown telling them I was a fine citizen, standing up for me, which I told her she should not do anymore. The less said to those men, the better.

“Maybe you’re wrong,” she said. “Maybe we need to give them what for.”

“Why? What does it matter if I go on their list as a Communist?”

“For one thing, it proves their so-called informing man was reliable. Whoever is making things up about you. Now these agents will look on their Communist list and see you’re on it. Then they’ll look to see who accused you, and they’ll say, ‘Well, good, that fellow was reliable. We’ll use him again.’”

That is true. She was right. Her acuity humbled me.

She had more to say, about using gossip as its own evidence. The Woman’s Club now has a committee to check the schoolbooks for Americanism. In Mrs. Brown’s opinion things have gone too far, it’s time somebody showed some intestinal fortitude. Her words. She was holding back tears. What I held back, that would be harder to name. Chispa strolled in with her tail high, indifferent to the crisis. Checked the half-filled food dish next to the Philco, snubbed it, left the kitchen. Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

I told Mrs. Brown she should consider looking for a different job. Her eyes flew wide, the sandwich in both hands. She looked like an advertisement.

“You firing me, Mr. Shepherd? For what I just said?”

I told her that wasn’t it. That I was very worried about causing her more trouble than I already had. She drank half a glass of water and went to look for a handkerchief in the other room. I heard her rummaging in the big leather mail pouch. I cleared the plates, put that sandwich out of sight so it wouldn’t be the end of her. Some waterworks in the dining room, I think. All dried up when she returned, but the eyes were puffy.