I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours’ work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasn’t, I told her, it would be done, anyway.
“Mr. Noonan, that’s far too much,” she said.
“Maybe and maybe not, but it’s what I’m paying,” I said. “Will you do it?”
She said she would, of course she would.
Perhaps predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didn’t want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding anything that would embarrass them or me: a pair of Johanna’s silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (“We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael,” she said to me once, “have you noticed?”), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unfiushed toilet. In truth, I can’t tell you any one thing I was looking for; that sense of operating in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic killer had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. Piece of fish for supper, she had said. And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice.
Near the end of my “pre-cleaning,” I looked under our bed and saw an open paperback on Jo’s side. She hadn’t been dead long, but few household lands are so dusty as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johanna’s face and hands in her coffin—Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get dusty inside a coffin? Surely not, but- I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept creeping back, like Tolstoy’s white bear.
Johanna and I had both been English majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury Town cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwright with the reptile’s face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantic’s heart.
So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The &loon and Sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.)
She had been using a playing card from some defunct deck as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had been, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. “Sk hundred years from now,” she had said, “the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham.” This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didn’t laugh. I fell in love.
The playing card marked pages 102 and 103—Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maugham’s version of Paul Gauguin. The narrator tries to buck Stroeve up. My dearj3llow, don’t be unhappy. She’ll come back…
“Easy for you to say,” I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me.
I turned the page and read this: Strickland’s injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve Jund himself on the floor.
“tau funny little man,” said Strickland.
It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten—how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life—I understood it wasn’t a mistake that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead.
My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadn’t been there, I would have fallen to the floor. We weep from our eyes, it’s all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every pore of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain; in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing “Blessed Assurance” in his high, sweet tenor voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadn’t really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not: it insisted she was dead.
You funny little man, said Strickland.
I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when they’re unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are—logic like Dall clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs.
I put the playing-card bookmark back between pages 102 and 103—a turn of the index finger away from IOUJNNY little man, said Strickland now and forever—and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it.
Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the box spring and caressed her cheek like a feather.
Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane.
“Give me that,” she hissed. “It’s my dust-catcher.” She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost.
She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face—a shroud of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed.
I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadn’t been asleep long—the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me.
There was nothing there, of course—dreams are just dreams.
Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.
I never suffered from writer’s block during the ten years of my marriage, and did not suffer it immediately after Johanna’s death. I was in fact so unfamiliar with the condition that it had pretty well set in before I knew anything out of the ordinary was going on. I think this was because in my heart I believed that such conditions only affected “literary’’ types of the sort who are discussed, deconstructed, and sometimes dismissed in the New York Review of Books. My writing career and my marriage covered almost exactly the same span. I finished the first draft of my first novel, Being Two, not long after Jo and I became officially engaged (I popped an opal ring on the third finger of her left hand, a hundred and ten bucks at Day’s Jewellers, and quite a bit more than I could afford at the time… but Johanna seemed utterly thrilled with it), and I finished my last novel, All the Pay from the 3p, about a month after she was declared dead. This was the one about the psychotic killer with the love of high places. It was published in the fall of 1995. I have published other novels since then—a paradox I can explain—but I don’t think there’ll be a Michael Noonan novel on any list in the foreseeable future. I know what writer’s block is now, all right. I know more about it than I ever wanted to.
When I hesitantly showed Jo the first draft of Being Two, she read it in one evening, curled up in her favorite chair, wearing nothing but panties and a tee-shirt with the Maine black bear on the front, drinking glass after glass of iced tea. I went out to the garage (we were renting a house in Bangor with another couple on as shaky financial ground as we were… and no, Jo and I weren’t quite married at that point, although as far as I know, that opal ring never left her finger) and puttered aimlessly, feeling like a guy in a New Yorker cartoon one of those about funny fellows in the delivery waiting room. As I remember, I fucked up a so-simple-a-child-can-do-it birdhouse kit and almost cut off the index finger of my left hand. Every twenty minutes or so I’d go back inside and peek at Jo. If she noticed, she gave no sign. I took that as hopeful. I was sitting on the back stoop, looking up at the stars and smoking, when she came out, sat down beside me, and put her hand on the back of my neck. “Well?” I said. “It’s good,” she said. “Now why don’t you come inside and do me?” And before I could answer, the panties she had been wearing dropped in my lap in a little whisper of nylon.
Afterward, lying in bed and eating oranges (a vice we later outgrew), I asked her: “Good as in publishable?”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but I’ve been reading for pleasure all my life—Curious George was my first love, if you want to know—”
“I don’t.” She leaned over and popped an orange segment into my mouth, her breast warm and provocative against my arm. “—and I read this with great pleasure. My prediction is that your career as a reporter for the Devry News is never going to survive its rookie stage.
I think I’m going to be a novelist’s wife.”
Her words thrilled me—actually brought goosebumps out on my arms. No, she didn’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but if she believed, I believed… and belief turned out to be the right course. I got an agent through my old creative-writing teacher (who read my novel and damned it with faint praise, seeing its commercial qualities as a kind of heresy, I think), and the agent sold Being Two to Random House, the first publisher to see it.
Jo was right about my career as a reporter, as well. I spent four months covering flower shows, drag races, and bean suppers at about a hundred a week before my first check from Random House came in—$27,000, after the agent’s commission had been deducted. I wasn’t in the newsroom long enough to get even that first minor bump in salary, but they had a going-away party for me just the same. At Jack’s Pub, this was, now that I think of it. There was a banner hung over the tables in the back room which said GOOD LUCK MIKE—WRITE ON! Later, when we got home, Johanna said that if envy was acid, there would have been nothing left of me but my belt-buckle and three teeth.
Later, in bed with the lights out—the last orange eaten and the last cigarette shared—I said, “No one’s ever going to confuse it with Look Homeward, Angel, are they?” My book, I meant. She knew it, just as she knew I had been fairly depressed by my old creative-writing teacher’s response to Two.
“You aren’t going to pull a lot of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you?” she asked, getting up on one elbow. “If you are, I wish you’d tell me now, so I can pick up one of those do-it-yourself divorce kits first thing in the morning.”
I was amused, but also a little hurt. “Did you see that first press release from Random House?” I knew she had. “They’re just about calling me V. C. Andrews with a prick, for God’s sake.”
“Well,” she said, lightly grabbing the object in question, “you do have a prick. As far as what they’re calling you… Mike, when I was in third grade, Patty Banning used to call me a booger-hooker. But I wasn’t.”
“Perception is everything.”
“Bullshit.” She was still holding my dick and now gave it a formidable squeeze that hurt a little and felt absolutely wonderful at the same time. That crazy old trouser mouse never really cared what it got in those days, as long as there was a lot of it. “Happiness is everything.
Are you happy when you write, Mike?”
“Sure.