Love Me (6 page)

 

 

 

Dear Lonely, There’s a dark and a stormy side of life. There’s a bright and a sunny side, too. Though we meet with the darkness and strife, the sunny side we also may view. And here you are on the frozen tundra, hounded by prosecutors, your lunch eaten by others, and you wonder,
Where is the beauty? Where is the grandeur?
You paid dearly for one tiny misstep and this sin brought you to Jesus, who (you thought) introduced you to Myrna, who turns out to be as unforgiving as any other woman. What can I say? There are women like her all over. And, Scripture says, “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.” I happen to be married to a forgiving woman. I committed worse sins than yours but I did them when the prosecutors were at the ballgame. Go talk to a shrink about the depression and see what one of these snazzy new antidepressants can do. New ones are invented every day. The latest ones make you cheery
and
smart. If those don’t work, there’s always the Trappists. Plenty of work to do, no yakking, no Myrnas or LeAnns. Good Luck. Maybe I’ll put you in my novel if I ever get around to writing it.

Brianna was exquisite in a wholesome way. She was sleek and soft and carnally inclined, but she also knew all the Bible stories and knew about farming and fishing and church dinners. She wasn’t a heathen. She wrapped herself around me like a C-clamp and though it bothered me that she said “axe” instead of
ask,
and “pitcher” for
picture,
I forgot about that when we made love, which we did three more times, unabashed whole-hearted aerobic Minnesota sex, and then she broke it off because she felt too guilty. “I wouldn’t know how to explain this to my mother,” she said. “Shacking up with a married man. I adore you and everything but it’s not who I am, you know?” We kissed and she got in her car and waved and drove down University Avenue.

I didn’t see how I could go back to the clinic after that and shoot into a cup, and I told Iris I needed to take a vacation from fertility, and she said, “Me, too. Let’s give it a rest.” A few times she mentioned adoption, in a vague way, as you might mention parasailing or hang gliding, not that you were planning to do it next week. And then thoughts of parenthood sort of vanished. Her mother inquired about it once at the cabin over beverages and Iris said, “I have no time to raise a child. And I don’t want to hire somebody else to do it for me. The world is full of neglected children and adults suffering from their childhoods and maybe God put me here to try to make up the deficit.” And that was that. We never discussed it. The door closed. I got a vasectomy in the spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Leery, A romp in the hay lingers in your memory like the first line of a song but your true love is the one you make a life with and write more than one line about, you write a whole book. I’m sure that the Paul Bunyan experience was wonderful, your sensations were heightened, your skin tingled, your orifices pulsated, but please change it to the Joe Foss Motel in Yankton and change the description of the young honey to match your wife’s. Make sure you get the color of the hair and eyes right. Tonight when your wife is asleep, pry open one eyelid and check the color. Give that color to the heroine. Then you’ll be okay.

 

 

 

My Great Midwestern Novel was now called
The Land of Their Children,
and the Farmer-Labor party was gone, replaced by a cult of rune worshippers, but it was dull, dull, dull, nothing a person would actually want to read if you had a choice.

“How’s it coming?” Iris asked.

“It’s coming.”

I kept rewriting the first paragraph:

And then one bright summer day I threw it in the garbage.

I read a book called
How to Write Your Novel in Thirty Days
and one paragraph jumped up and kicked me in the butt:

This was one month post-Brianna. It made sense. So I threw out the passages about the beauty of the prairie and the courage of the people yes the people, and I began a book in which four Petersons, Cindy and Stewart and little Carrie and Hugh, head for Duluth in a Chevy and stop near Hinckley to read an historic roadside plaque and a hitchhiker with a suitcase that says “Winnipeg” jumps out and pulls a pistol and shoves into the front seat next to Cindy and tells Stewart, “Drive, you sonofabitch, or the lady gets a slug in the chest and if you don’t think I mean it, go ahead and press your luck.” He is Canadian but he is rotten to the core. A few miles farther on, he says to Stewart, “You remind me of my daddy, who beat me to a pulp all those years. I could kill you with one blow to your windpipe and shoot the others and dump your bodies in the trunk and drive to a junkyard and put the car through the compactor and buy myself a porterhouse steak with the dough from your wallet and enjoy every bite of it, mister. I’ve hated your guts since I was eight years old. My daddy’s dead, so there’s no satisfaction to be had there. But somebody else ought to die for his sins, I say. And fate seems to have selected you. Do you believe in fate? I do. God gave me to my daddy and now God’s given you to me. Killing is too good for you.” And Stewart pleads with him.
Please please please.
“We’re good people. We’ve never harassed anybody. Why not join the marines and go kill foreign people?” And the hitchhiker says, “I
am
a foreign people.” And he laughs his brutal psychopathic laugh. And Cindy begs him to spare the children. And the hitchhiker says, “Ma‘am, with all due respect, adulthood is no great prize for anybody and they’d be all messed up if they seen you get killed. They’d prob’ly go on a killing rampage of their own. More merciful to let ‘em die innocent and happy.” And he stuffs them in the trunk, tied and gagged and doped up, and the car is second in line to be compacted, and a little old deputy sheriff named Jerry Sandoval sees a shirttail poking out from under the trunk lid and sashays over and saves the day. He gets the Petersons out and he chases the hitchhiker in a stolen roadster at high speeds on gravel roads through peaceful farm country and the hitchhiker rolls the car and is thrown clear and runs to a nearby cottage where a family of potters lives and holds them hostage until the dad conks him with an earthenware platter and the criminal is sent straight to prison. “You ain’t heard the last of me,” he snarls as he climbs into the prison van, thus setting up a sequel.

I called it
Spacious Skies.
I sent it to an agent. Iris was busy raising money for a hotline for chemically dependent transgender people. Something like that. My father was sending me neoconservative books, pounds of them. The IRS was after me for $3,000 in back taxes. My Dodge Dart died. Jehovah’s Witnesses kept dropping by to talk about prophecy. Katherine published a tiny collection of prose poems called
The River Whose Name Is God,
and when I sent her a note of congratulations, she sent me a letter complaining of loneliness.

I was lonely, too. Lonely and longing for a little fame. A line in the St. Paul paper gave me exquisite pain:

I clipped it out and taped it to my studio wall.
Local writer.
Not how I envision myself:
the guy who lives up the block and has written some stuff
Please, dear Lord, do not let me die a local writer. Bury me out on the lone prairie in an unmarked grave rather than in Calvary Cemetery on Front Street under a tombstone that reads:

I patterned the Petersons after Iris’s friends from the U, Bob and Sandy, and I patterned the murderous hitchhiker after their son, Eirdhru. Only six years old at the time, but I could easily imagine him putting people in a metal compactor.

They live in Frogtown so Eirdhru can grow up with people of other races, who Eirdhru is learning to beat up on. Eirdhru is Gaelic for “he who comes in the night with loud singing.” Sandy, a good liberal, is dedicated to fighting the good fight against cruelty and ignorance and deep in her heart she knows that her child is both of them. A racist skinhead is exactly who Eirdhru will become—the signs are so clear. Sandy and Bob may someday be the Parents of a Famous Mass Killer and believe me, they think about this often themselves. A reasonable fear, given Eirdhru’s temperament. He is rotten to the core, like that Canadian hitchhiker.

 

 

 

Two weeks after I sent the book off, the agent called, breathless, to say, “Guess what?”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I am so happy for you.”

Two minutes later, Bob and Sandy walk in and he and I hug a caring male hug (required) and she gives me a sideways look as if I’ve just been acquitted of child molestation on a technicality, and she says, “Iris says you’re working hard on your book.”

“All done. Sent it off. And it was just bought by a publisher,” I said.

“Oh,” she says. “Cool.”As if this sort of thing happened regularly in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Bob: “What sort of book is it?”

Me: “A novel.”

Sandy: “Well, I hope it’s not just about sex.”

Me: “It’s almost entirely about sex, Sandy. Except for some oak trees and two late model cars, it’s entirely about sex. Upstairs, downstairs, in the yard, in the car, under the car.”

“Oh, you’re just being stupid—” and we go to the kitchen where Iris is throwing supper together.

“They are going to publish my book,” I announce to Iris.

“Great,” she says. She kisses me. I hold on to her and whisper in her ear, “They’re giving me $75,000 for it.” She stiffens. Delight or fear—hard to tell which. “I get the check in two weeks.”

“That must be tough, writing a book,” Bob says. “God. I don’t know how you do it. Making up all that stuff.”

“I don’t make up a thing, Bob,” I say. “You’re in the book. Hair and all.” He gives me a queasy smile. But he’s not sure I’m joking. “I’ve got you in there, except I made you mulatto.” He runs this line past a focus group he keeps in his head—Gloria Steinem, Mister Rogers, Al Gore, Maya Angelou—he asks them, “Is this funny?” And they shake their heads. So it’s not funny. Sandy doesn’t think so, either. Iris is thinking about the $75,000.

Sandy is in a snit over something she heard on the news and moaning about that—some fearful injustice or other, take your pick—as Iris serves up the beans and Bob pops open a beer. We sit down to eat and the conversation drifts along the familiar lines—
I don’t know how people can live in the suburbs, I honestly don‘t, it’s so sterile, I visit my sister in Eden Prairie and there’s no place to walk, no downtown, no black people—I don’t know why people send their kids to private schools, we’re losing all sense of community in this town—I don’t know what people see in television nowadays, all that violence and ogling of women
—and an alarm sounds in my
head: Old Liberal Talk. Get Away. Get Away. Grave Risk of Contagion.
Sandy’s cold disapproving glance lands on me like a horsefly and Bob goes on complaining about the dreariness of mass media and how much more enlightened the Danes are, and I push back my chair and excuse myself. “I’m going for a walk.” “Where?” says Iris. She wants to come with me, but she doesn’t know how to rid us of these two wounded woodchucks. “Anywhere. Just need some fresh air.” This gets Sandy going on the subject of air quality standards.

 

 

 

Spacious Skies came out in the fall and was immediately a hit. I climbed on that old toboggan of fame and fortune and over the edge I went and the hill went on forever and forever and forever. The world took my little book to its bosom, I was the blue-eyed boy, Mr. Touchdown, fortune’s favorite, king of the hill, the blue-light special. Better men who had labored decades to produce novels of real substance were tossed aside like driftwood in favor of Mr. Wonderful—the world loves success and despises failure! If you’re one of Iris’s demented geezers, you can’t get the time of day, but if you’re a big winner and have everything you could ever want, America can’t do enough for you! People strive to pile more and more crowns on your head.