Moth (20 page)

W
HEN
I
GOT
BACK
TO
THE
HOUSE
A
LOUETTE
was on the phone, as she’d been on the phone pretty much nonstop since the morning before. Thus far she had set up two job interviews, attended another, arranged for information to be mailed concerning GED testing and night classes at Delgado, Xavier and UNO, and spoken with an MHMR counselor about vocational programs. Now she was talking to Richard Garces about outpatient therapy and local support groups.

Not long after I came in, she hung up, scribbled one final note and shut the notebook.

“How’d it go?”

I shrugged.

“That bad, huh?”

“Maybe a little worse.”

“I’m sorry.”

So of course I had to laugh, then explain why.

“Did you know Richard was a hippie? And a junkie? A long time ago, of course.”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“Were you a hippie, Lewis? You know, wearing vests without shirts and bell-bottoms and flowers in your hair? Back in the sixties, I mean.”

“What I was in the sixties, mostly, was drunk—at least from about ‘68 on. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to social movements. Or to other people, for that matter.”

“You were a bodyguard then, right?”

I looked up, surprised. Not many people knew about that. Verne had, naturally. And Walsh, because that was how we’d first met.

“I haven’t said anything before, but I know quite a bit about you, Lewis. More than you think.”

I poured tea into my cup, added milk.

“When I was in grade school I had this friend, your classic nerd type, glasses and ugly print shirts, the whole thing, but he was a computer whiz. What everybody calls a hacker now. He was really weird. Look, this is kind of a long story.”

“I’ll drink slowly.”

“And probably a dull one.”

“About me? Impossible.”

“Yeah, right. Well anyway, Cornell’s dad was an engineer with IBM or Apple or someone, and he always had these new computers around the house, products they were developing, or marketing. Cornell told me he grew up with these things as playmates instead of other kids. He thought everybody did. And he could do anything he wanted with them.

“I was twelve or thirteen. And I just decided one day that my father couldn’t really be my father. Mother was gone, I was hopelessly miserable. I couldn’t talk to him, or to anyone else in the house, and I knew there was just no way I belonged there.”

“Most children go through that at some point.”

“I know that, now. I think I kind of knew it even then. I was never lucky enough to be stupid.”

“But you had to set yourself apart.”

She nodded. “And I knew a little about you, just from things I’d heard. So I decided
you
had to be my father. It made a lot of sense at the time; it was the only thing that did. This was about when Cornell and I started being friends. Neither of us had ever had friends before, and I can’t remember now how it happened, but somehow he started coming over after school, spending recess and lunch hour with me. One afternoon we sneaked into this office my father had at home, though I wasn’t ever supposed to be in there, and Cornell showed me how to use the computer. If you knew how, you could dial into all kinds of information banks, he told me; you could find out almost anything you wanted to know.

“I thought about that for days. Then the next Saturday when Cornell came over—my father was at work, as usual—I told him about you. What little I knew, and a lot more I made up. And Monday he brought me this folder full of stuff. Copies of official forms, printouts of what I guess had been newspaper articles, parts of some kind of dossier the FBI had on you. That one said you killed a man.”

I nodded.

“A sniper, according to the dossier. It said he’d killed at least eight people.”

“At least.”

“You stopped working as a bodyguard after that.”

“I stopped doing much of anything. Just kind of drifted into it. Drank a lot. It was a bad time.”

“Every night I’d get out that folder and read it. It was like making constellations out of stars: just raw information, that you could fill out any way you wanted. So every night I’d look at some facts, facts I knew by heart by then, and use them to make up stories about you. Those stories became more real to me than the world around me, more real than anything else, and for a time, far more important. Though all along I knew it wasn’t true. I knew you weren’t my father.”

“And that I wasn’t a hero.”

She nodded. “And that life is just doing the things you have to do: staying alive, getting through the day, turning into your parents. Maybe I was wrong about that part, huh? Maybe there’s something more to it?”

“Maybe.”

“Can I make you another pot of tea? That has to be cold by now.”

“Only if you’ll have some too. I’m already sloshing when I walk.”

“Deal.”

We went out to the kitchen. I leaned against the sink thinking of meals I’d prepared long ago for Verne, for Vicky and Cherie, remembering their laughter, seeing their faces, as Alouette emptied the kettle, drew fresh water and put it on to boil, filled the pot with hot water from the tap.

“Transportation’s going to be the biggest problem,” she said. “I figure between work, group meetings and whatever classes I settle on, I’m going to be piling up a lot of miles. I’ll centralize what I can, find locations closer in to home. But some of it, like work and school, won’t be so easy.”

“Give it time. We’ll see. Things start working out so that you decide you need a car, I’ll match whatever money you can save up for one. And I’ll take you to a friend who has a used-car lot and owes me a few favors.”

“All
right
.”

She emptied the pot, measured in Earl Grey, poured water, stirred once and set it to steep under a brocade cozy Vicky had sent me from Scotland years back.

When the tea was ready, we went back into the living room. Alouette settled on the couch with her notebook, feet tucked under her. I sat in my chair with a copy of Queneau’s
Zazie dans le métro.
I looked up at her after a while and thought how strange this tableau, this quiet domestic scene, was for both of us. Then how very alone I had been all these years, and how good it was to have someone here again.

Q
UENEAU
ONCE
REMARKED
THAT
JUST
about anyone could learn to move characters around, getting them from place to place and scene to situation, pushing them through pages like sheep until finally one arrived at something people would read as a novel. But Queneau himself wanted the characters and their relationships—to one another, to the sprawl of human history and thought, to the book itself—to be structured, wanted those relationships to be in the word’s purest sense
constructed
: in short, he wanted something more.

There are those who would argue—
engagés
like Sartre, or perhaps in our own country the late John Gardner—that, in eschewing the tenets of “realistic” or mimetic fiction, he wanted less.

This strain of what we might call irrealism, this motive of artifice, in French fiction reaches back at least to Roussel, whose
Locus Solus
some of you may have encountered in Jack Palangian’s magic-realism seminar, and persists today in the work of Georges Perec, the group OuLiPo—cofounded by Queneau, incidentally—and American expatriate Harry Mathews.

Le Chiendent,
Queneau’s first published novel, in fact consciously, deliberately parodies most all the conventions of realistic fiction.

It is a rigorously structured novel. Ninety-one parts: seven chapters each containing thirteen sections, each of them with its three unities of time, place and action, each confined to a specific mode of representation, or narrative: narration only, narration with dialogue, dialogue alone, interior monologue, letters, newspaper articles, dreams.

The novel, a meditation on the Cartesian
cogito,
in fact had its beginning in Queneau’s attempt to translate Descartes into demotic French. It opens with a bank clerk, Etienne Marcel, coming to consciousness, surfacing out of the slough of his unexamined life, while looking into a shop window. Taking substance from his sudden self-consciousness,
and
from the objective existence accrued from Pierre le Grand, who has happened to see him there at the window and become curious about him, Étienne is plunged headlong into a series of adventures—into the thick of life itself.

At one point le Grand, through whose eyes we witness much of the book’s early action, says: “I am observing a man.” And his confidante replies: “You don’t say! Are you a novelist?” To which he replies: “No. A character.”

As things go on, and as still more characters and situations are introduced, many of them truly bizarre—it’s rather like those jugglers who begin with a small cane or club and end up piling chair atop chair, all of it tottering there far above them—the novel turns ever more fantastic, drifting further and further from the moorings of realistic fiction, until at last the reader is forced to abandon any pretense that he’s reading a story about “real” people or events and to admit that he is only participating in the arbitrary constructions—reflective, complex, but always arbitrary—of a writer. A sophisticated game-playing.

From one of the novel’s many discursive passages:

“People think they are doing one thing, and then they do another. They think they are making a pair of scissors, but they have made something quite different. Of course, it is a pair of scissors, it is made to cut and it cuts, but it is also something quite different.”

A character muses: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to say what that “something else” is? And that is exactly what Queneau attempts, here and in all his work: to touch on that “something else” we sense, yet never locate, in our lives.

Yet because he has a kind of horror of seriousness, it’s often at their most profound moments that his books and poems turn outrageously comic, dissolving into puns, bits of allusive and other business, vaudeville jokes, slapstick. One often thinks they are books that might have been written by an extraordinarily brilliant child.

Which brings us, quite naturally, to
Zazie,
a best-seller for Queneau and perhaps his most easily accessible novel.

As the book opens, murderous dwarf Bébé Overall has abducted little Zazie from the department store where her young mother was choosing fine Irish linen and has taken her into his underground lair far beneath the Paris
métro
lines, a place frequented by old circus performers, arthritic guitar players and legless Apache dancers, ancient socialists with Marx-like beards and tiny Trotsky spectacles. There Bébé—

Yes, Miss Mara?

I see. You may be right; perhaps in my enthusiasm I am not describing Queneau’s novel at all, but rather some alternate version, some
possibility,
of my own; have begun, as some colleagues might say, deconstructing it. Why don’t
you
tell us what
actually
happens in
Zazie dans le métro?

I
WAS,
IN
A
SENSE,
SINGING
FOR
MY
SUPPER.
A latter-day minstrel show for ol’ massuh, ol’ massuh in this case being Dean Treadwell, who had chosen today—my first day back, after yesterday sheepishly calling my department chairman, apologizing for my absence so profusely that I began to stammer, and finally pleading a family emergency—to audit, as was his custom once each term with every course offered under his aegis, my class.

Miss Mara acquitted herself well, the students had actually read
Zazie,
and discussion was lively. One of the young men took a particular, keen delight in Zazie’s Uncle Gabriel, pitching his voice throughout the discussion in a high, thin flutter he obviously imagined similar to the uncle’s own during his performances as a female impersonator.

As the students filed out, Dean Treadwell came up to me and held out his hand.

“Fine class. Somehow you have a way of making it all real to them, making them care. I wish half of my other teachers could do that.”

“You caught me on a good day. Most others, the snoring would have distracted you.”

“Fascinating. And I never even
heard
of Queneau before this.”

“Three weeks ago, none of the students had either. A semester from now, most of them will have forgotten him.”

“You have a minute, Lew?”

“Actually, I have about four hours—till my seminar after lunch.”

“Walk with me, then. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

“Sure. But if the coffee’s from one of the faculty lounges, I’ll pay
you
not to have to drink it.”

We ambled out into the hallway and along it, heads together like two monks strolling the cloisters as they kicked Boethius back and forth.

“I don’t know how you’ll feel about this …”

I let it hang there.

“I understand from some of the faculty members, and from my wife as well, that you worked for many years as a detective.”

“Worked
at
it, anyway.”

Two of my students from Advanced Conversational passed us. One of them said
Bonjour,
the other Hey, how’s it going?

We wound up off-campus, at one of the coffeehouses that suddenly seem to be springing up everywhere in New Orleans. This one was a Tennessee Williams set: a hodgepodge of rickety ancient tables and chairs, crumbling plaster walls, windows so hazed you could safely watch eclipses through them, door open onto a dank inner patio where a three-legged cat furiously eyed all trespassers. A massive mahogany counter built directly into the tiled floor and topped with a slab of green marble dominated the room. A cork bulletin board took up most of the back wall, scaled in layers of handbills for alternative music, scribbled ads offering musical equipment for sale, notices of tutors and roommates wanted.