“Mr. Shepherd, don’t you read the papers? They’ve already had me as your secret wife, the whore of Babylon, crime partner, and I don’t know what. Your bee keeper, for all I know. Who else would have me now? My stars, I might yet learn to keep bees.”
That is what she said, bee keeper. I wanted to give her a bear hug. It would have involved lifting her off her feet, she’s so small, I really could see the whole thing. Probably we both did, facing one another in a white-tiled kitchen, hands open at our sides, the embrace playing out between us like a motion-picture scene that makes you whistle and throw popcorn. We elected just to stand and watch it.
We made the agreement then. I would keep her hired, on certain conditions. A lot of things had to be taken care of: all the rest of the old notebooks. All those names and dates. I have done nothing wrong, she knows this and I know it, and still we both understand the position she is in. They could get a warrant, use something in those notebooks as evidence and make her a party to it.
I told her it’s time, I kept saying that. It is time. I’d been piddling at it, trying for more than a year since we pitched Billy Boorzai into the flames. Better dead than read, I told her. Expecting a fight, but strangely, no fight came. Not even from Violet the defiant, who always insists, Those are your words so claim them, leave your bairns not to be orphaned, you wrote those. She too is defeated. She wanted to do the job herself. Stood at the door watching while I cleared the whole shelf, all the way back to the beginning. She seemed as eager as I was to get it over with, taking our medicine.
She went downstairs with the first armload, and I ransacked my desk drawers. Sometimes I’ll type up a day and forget to file it with the others. And letters. I’d long since done away with Frida’s—they were hardly mine to begin with—but the carbons of my own were harder to part with. I scooped up all that now, and odd little clippings I’d kept, oh, I was on a tear. By the time she had the fire going in the tar bucket outdoors, I was making a mad sack of the house to see if there were any notebooks I’d missed, hidden from myself like a drunk’s gin bottle tucked in the chandelier. It feels that way sometimes, that desperate.
I went a day. Spent that evening standing at the window lighting one cigarette off the last, after she’d gone, to keep myself from sitting and writing out the scene as freshly recalled. One week, thirty packs of cigarettes. Weeks. Without spooling out more of a tale, creating more to burn, knitting away at the front of the long knotted scarf that will have to be unraveled at the back. How helpless I feel before this flood of words, how ridiculous. A hundred times trying to shut off the flow. Under orders from Mother. From Frida and Diego, arms crossed, feet tapping, stop it. In the name of the law. Stop writing down everything, it makes me nervous. And something inside the boy cries out, Those are the only two choices: read, or dead.
This only feels like madness; really now it’s just the usual thing, summer and polio. Going mad inside a house. The wisteria vines have blocked up the windows. No matter where I try to look out, it’s those palmate leaves, green hands shoved against my eyes. The neighbor used to bring over his pruners and do the job as a favor, but Myers likely advised him against pruning Communist vines. He hasn’t done his own either, I notice. The house looks like it’s cowering behind its own shrubbery. Every bungalow on the block is the same, curtained, folded shut. Quarantine. The siege of Berlin ended May 12, the barricades finally came down. But here they seem high as ever.
Tommy can’t risk the plague—Keep cool, he says. Nor can Mrs. Brown, but she would if she could, I’m sure of that.
Lincoln Barnes says, Don’t get excited. Arthur Gold has informed him that breach of contract can be costly, and they would be wise to release this book on the schedule previously agreed upon by all parties. He must have been persuasive. Barnes said if we don’t make any waves they’ll put the book out quietly, buried in their list of summer reading.
America has had a change of management. It’s as plain as anything in the magazine advertisements. All the July issues came this week, and where are the square-shouldered gals pouring Ovaltine for their children, the mother who knows what’s best? Who smiles ruefully and shakes her finger at that husband who used the wrong hair tonic? She’s fired. They’ve got scientists in now, white laboratory coats and reports showing that the ordinary doesn’t measure up to our brand. Goodness, they can prove anything: skin softness, quicker relief. I miss the mothers. If you didn’t like the taste of Ovaltine, you might have wheedled. With these new authorities, you’ve got no chance.
“Summer Reading” is upon us, but so far not one review of The Unforetold. Sales nil, reports Barnes; the bookstores have not really picked it up so much as others on the list. A whisper campaign, he was afraid of that. I just hope we won’t be sorry about this.
He needs to hire some of those scientists. Our studies show Harrison Shepherd provides a happier reader, 14 percent faster to achieve the racing pulse. This morning I found an advertisement for a condensed-book series: regular books with all the unnecessary parts cut out, to get it over faster. “Dr. George Gallup recently revealed in his polls, an astonishingly high percentage of the nation’s university graduates no longer read books. The reason is obvious: because of their educational advantages, they occupy positions where they are busy, busy, busy always!”
I’ll tell Barnes that must be it. Not a whisper campaign, no Communist longhairs or fairies about, everyone’s just too busy.
The library has opened two days a week now. Evidently the polio germ takes a rest on Mondays and Fridays. Well, three cheers for the brave ladies who volunteered to preside over the crypt. Not a soul in the place, the perfect opportunity to walk about openly carrying Look Homeward, Angel and Tropic of Cancer without raising an eyebrow. All of Henry Miller in fact, I’ll take the whole pile, and Kinsey too.
How extraordinary he is, the good Dr. Kinsey. Another man in a white coat, with proof. Everything we ever dared think about men and sex turns out to be true. One hundred percent of men are homosexual for 4 percent of their lives (the Billy Boorzais), and 4 percent are homosexual for 100 percent of their lives (the Tommy Cuddys). Strangest of all, Dr. Kinsey’s book has not been checked out of the library before. Not even once: the slip in the jacket hasn’t a single name on it. Yet the spine was well cracked, every page of the book dog-eared and bent.