Perfect Reader (8 page)

Just before nine o’clock, her father always found a stopping place and closed the book, and the two of them went upstairs and turned on the television. Together, they watched a show her mother would never have watched, where things blew up and people jumped out of planes and punched one another. It was terrible, a fact both Flora and her father freely acknowledged, but they loved it. The show was funny, both intentionally and unintentionally, and they shouted at the television as they watched.

“Not everyone can appreciate the subtle genius of this show,” he told her. “But you and I, we’ve grasped the secret of its stealthy power, haven’t we?”

And Flora loved the exclusivity of it all—of the show and Ponzu, that they were hers and her father’s and only sometimes Georgia’s. There was no need to share with others. Tuesdays were theirs, and no one else’s.

Before bed, Flora’s mother called to check in. Her voice from the city sounded different, lighter. It was her old voice, temporarily restored, though often she sounded tired from her drive, or all the analyzing, and Flora, wide-awake, tried to make her voice sound tired, too. But Flora wasn’t much for talking on the phone, and after a few minutes she would pass it off to her father and brush her teeth and get ready for bed while her parents talked. When her father hung up, she could see the pull of work and other matters on his face—he, who had been hers all night, no longer hers. He tucked her in quickly, rushing a little, pulling the blankets up around her ears and telling her she was “the best of all possible Flos,” and then he turned out the light and went next door, into his study, and she listened for the sounds of his worries—papers whispering against one another, books slipping away from the shelf, the sigh of leather as he adjusted himself in his chair.

It was then, staring at the light from his study as it sneaked beneath her door, that Flora began to miss her mother, her stomach suddenly a little queasy. She lay on her side, and the sound of her own heartbeat in her ear worried her, and she played the game she played when she couldn’t sleep, trying to scare herself to sleep. There was a witch walking up the long, formal staircase, moving slowly, step by step, each heartbeat another step. Now she was at the last step Flora and Georgia could jump off of; now she was on the landing; now she was admiring the chandelier. Flora had to be asleep by the time the witch got to the doorway of her room, or else. On other nights, her parents inhabited their separate spheres throughout the house, but they were both there. Flora could find them if she needed to; she knew where they were, the world less precarious, quieter.

Still other nights, they both were gone. Her father traveled for work—he was out wooing fat cats, a funny image—and would bring her T-shirts from the cities he visited:
CLEVELAND
—
YOU
’
VE GOTTA BE TOUGH
;
ITHACA IS GORGES
. Flora treasured them, as if they were thoughtful gifts. Sometimes her mother went along. Once, they were invited to the president’s house in Washington, D.C. They both had voted against the president, but it was only Joan who wondered if she could bear to sit in the same room with him. She bought a floor-length shimmering blue dress that made her blue-gray eyes shine like icy water. She had never looked more beautiful, though she complained it had been a mistake, it wasn’t her, she felt like an imposter.

“Maybe it’s okay if it’s not you,” Flora said. “That way you can pretend you’re someone else when you have to meet the president. Someone who likes him more.”

“I’m getting tired of being someone else,” her mother said.

Mrs. J. came and stayed with Flora and made her beef stew and they played gin rummy on the red Formica of the kitchen counter and drank soda, and Flora didn’t miss her parents at all. Mrs. J. told her stories. The previous president of Darwin had killed himself. Not in the house, but after. He’d been a good man, Mrs. J. said, but he’d had a hard time of it.

“Some people are too good for this world,” she said—a chastening dictum that seemed to rewrite the universe, and Flora’s place in it.

Her parents had probably not told Flora this on purpose. It would be a story she would cling to, or one that clung to her. A story she knew without them knowing, that she knew in spite of them. Some people were too good for this world, and some people weren’t.

A few weeks after the trip, a photograph arrived in the mail. It was of Joan Dempsey shaking hands with the president in the receiving line, signed to her across the bottom, “With kind regards,” from him.

“What am I supposed to do with this? Frame it and hang it on my wall?”

“I’ll keep it,” Flora said.

But instead, her mother signed it, too, across the top, “With kind regards, Joan Dempsey,” and she mailed it right back to the White House.

It was embarrassing, like when her mother made a scene in a restaurant about the food not being warm or the plates arriving at different times. But it was also exciting. It was exciting when people misbehaved. Flora’s father, though, wasn’t excited.

“What an infantile thing to do,” he accused. “Was it really necessary?”

“When did you become such a coward?” her mother said, her voice as icy as her eyes.

5

Rearrangements

T
HE LIVING ROOM FURNITURE
in her father’s house was all wrong. When you entered the room, you were met with the back of the couch, rudely blocking your path. The best spot for reading—the faded gold armchair with its supplicant ottoman—was lampless. And the round wooden coffee table was simply too big for the space, an oversize hamburger bun in the center of the room. Flora pushed the couch out of the way and dragged the bun out of the room and into the kitchen. It was heavy, like dragging a fat corpse by the arms. She tried not to scuff the floors as she dragged, the attempt more theoretical than practical—moving furniture alone, there was no way not to scuff.

Now, if she moved the couch ninety degrees to the right, it would block the windows and the old door to the street. Ninety degrees to the left and it would block the fireplace. The only choice was to move the couch to its exact opposite position in the room, so it could look at where it once stood and face the world that had existed only behind it. Was it loneliness that created this compulsion to animate? Post-divorce, her mother had taken to furniture rearrangement as if it were a useful hobby, as she’d picked up other hobbies over the years, like hair dying, or clipping newspaper articles. On many days, returning from school to the small house they shared, Flora found that the living room and the dining room had switched places. A week later, they might have switched again. After months of this, she’d pretended not to notice; though carrying her dinner plate out from the kitchen, she would often find herself in the wrong room.

But she’d inherited the trait, the furniture-rearranging gene passed down from mother to daughter, along with the crooked row of bottom teeth, the circumflex eyebrows, the narrow feet. Flora loved rearranging her tiny one-bedroom apartment in the city, and in hotel rooms, or the homes of friends, or her boss’s office, she had to stop herself from moving things around. She could enter a room and see why it was wrong, and how to make it right, and this was one of the reasons she’d been good at her job. If only, she’d said in response to compliments, such problem-solving skills extended to other parts of life. But it had gotten her into trouble, too. Some people didn’t warm to the implication that what they had could be improved upon.

Back in that previous life that now seemed another person’s, weeks ago when she had a life that more nearly resembled the lives of her friends, Flora worked at a magazine for the domestically obsessive and organically minded, editing stories on other people’s houses. She wrote copy on subjects such as organizing your pantry, the best nontoxic paints, and biodynamic gardening. She’d liked gardening best: Having never actually done it herself, she found it closest to fiction. She liked dreaming up the exact adjective a green thumb might use for soil or trowels
(lush, loamy; ergonomic, essential)
. Orchids—the gardener of her mind was rugged and practical, moved by beautiful things but alarmed by fussiness—where would he stand on orchids? Where would he stand on Flora? He’d approve of the rearranging—it was, after all, a version of thrift, a chance to make changes without paying for them.

As soon as the couch reversed its position in the room, the gold chair could take its place. The gold chair: where her father had read in the evenings, and on weekends, the upholstery worn thin by the sedentary pleasures he took in life. She moved the chair so it was closest to the fireplace. She would make a fire, and sit in the chair, and finally read her father’s manuscript. The wood was out behind the garage. She made four trips—who knew how long this reading would take. She loved tending fires, prodding them into fuller life, but she’d never been good at starting them. Her father’s trick had been to incinerate an entire newspaper and begin with a great blaze that wore itself away in moments. He’d had wasteful habits, and this had seemed to her one of them. She used three sheets of newspaper, balled tightly, and built a pyramid of small logs and kindling around them. To her surprise, it caught on the first match. Smoke seeped into the house. It took her a moment to realize this was wrong and why. In the President’s House, the flue was perpetually open, her father having forgotten to close it, and bats had used it as a private entrance. She could see her parents standing in the industrial kitchen in their bathrobes, clutching badminton rackets, swatting at one terrified creature turned demonic, furry shuttlecock. It was tiny at rest, and large and looming in flight. When Flora had started to cry, her mother promised they would not hurt the bat.

“If we happen to hurt the little fucker, so be it,” her father had said. He was enjoying himself, into the sport of it. Afterward, once the winged rodent had been released unscathed, Flora had made him swear that he hadn’t been serious, that he’d meant the animal no harm. He had been unable to say so without grinning.

The flames were just low enough that she could reach in and lift the flue out of the way, but the room was invaded. She opened the old door to let the air change places. She retrieved the manuscript from where it lay buried in the body bag. She made a pot of tea. The living room was then cold, the fire dismal. She closed the door and placed two small logs on, easing them into perfect position with the tongs, which left the smell of metal on her hands. She poured the tea. She collected the papers and her mug and sat down in the gold chair. With the new configuration, there was nowhere to put her tea except the floor, and Larks came and lapped out of the cup before she could push him away.

“Okay, Larks,” Flora said. “You have that one.” Her father had made the dog tea—sweet, milky tea, as he’d made it for Flora when she was small—every afternoon.

She went back into the kitchen and poured herself another cup. She sat cross-legged in the gold chair, the manuscript on her lap. “I’m not performing for anyone anymore, just writing for myself,” her father had told her on his last visit. “Appallingly rough,” he’d said, resting the palm of his hand gently on the folder of poems. “Some good bits though, I think.”

The fire was suddenly impressive. She felt a childish pride looking at it. I did that, she thought, all by myself. But she could not make herself turn past the title page. Her father’s handwriting, neat and illegible:

In Darwin’s Gardens
POEMS
By Lewis Dempsey

The ink on the page was jet-black, the paper ivory and unlined. The stack of papers was the apotheosis of manuscript—so manuscriptlike, it looked a caricature, a prop designed by an expert.
Manu-script
. Funny the feminists hadn’t had their way with that one yet. So intimate—the handwritten word. The letters breathed on the page; the manuscript seemed to her alive. She didn’t like to be alone with it. It was as if writing were something one died of, like cancer or cholesterol. She imagined the words whispered in the pretend hush of gossip: “It wasn’t until he died that they found out—he had
poems.”

The words might have been written in another language, the shape of the letters exotic, except for the word
POEMS
, which her father had written all in capitals. She imagined him making each stroke slowly, smiling slightly in satisfaction. How one knew and recognized handwriting, as one knew and recognized a voice in the distance, or on the other end of a phone. These details of person-hood we learned and memorized, as if access to that information meant we knew and understood one another. We felt a sense of ownership knowing such things. But the voice died with the person, absent a recording—and she’d thrown away the answering machine. The handwriting survived, though, particularly if writing had been something one did. Journals and manuscripts, but in subtler manifestations, too—notes in margins, and “LD,” his initials, written into each of his books, alongside the date at which it had been read, and often numerous dates, numerous rereadings: “April ’64,” “June ’73,” “December ’89.” His full initials were really LSD, which Flora in middle school had teased him about, serenading him with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” though he had certainly never tried the drug or any drug stronger than aspirin. He’d been a bit of a square; intellectually daring, but in many ways a square.

He had wanted to be the poet, and not the poet’s ideal reader, but had taken the safer route. And had been dissatisfied all those years on the wrong side of the words. Not surprising, that; she knew well his disappointments. She’d just never thought he’d do anything to quell them. He understood his poets—“the Hardy Boys,” he called them, and Hardy most of all—knew them better, maybe, than they’d known themselves (or than he’d known himself), and though that hadn’t been enough, the scantness was more acceptable than the thought of failure. The whole thing very
Chariots of Fire—I won’t run if I can’t win
, and all that. Until the end. Had he guessed it was the end? In his final months, he’d reversed and risked himself, trading interpretation for invention, and started writing, and, from the look of the stack of poems, written a lot. And then he had given them to her, and left her alone with them, leaving her in the very position he had resented in his own life, the academic position, and now she had to be his perfect reader, the perfect understander, living not in her own imagination, but in his.

No one knew the poems existed. Her father had given them only to her. They could easily disappear. Manuscripts had disappeared before. Manuscript and fire—as linked in the literary imagination as tuberculosis and undiscovered genius. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, had famously not burned his friend’s papers, and all the literati considered him a hero for it. Having never read Kafka, Flora could imagine a world without him; her world
was
without him. She had read about the posthumous act of defiance at the Cross Library while doing her executioner research. Defiant, and dishonest, wasn’t it? Brod had what she wanted: instructions in a will. And ignored them.

A violent act: throwing a book on a fire. Irreversible, like death. And a bit Victorian—manuscripts weren’t burned anymore; they were lost in the wilds of hard drives, they crashed, or were mis takenly trashed. Something romantic and old-fashioned, then, in throwing papers on a fire. Also anti-intellectual, repressive, and selfish. What Republicans did, or geniuses overcome by madness. Her father had told her the story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti burying his manuscript with his muse, only to regret the move years later and have the body and papers disinterred. There were many acts more brutal than incineration.

What would it look like to incinerate a manuscript? How long to turn to ash and ember? Most of her father’s work Flora regarded with equal parts tedium and fascination. But the poems were a special case. It was flattering to be the only one he had trusted with them, as though he had left her, in addition to the house and the money, a piece of his mind, his most private self. Still, she did not want to read them. Reader’s block—a mutation of the old, familiar literary neurosis. She’d read poetry, but never seriously, and mostly at her father’s suggestion. “Pay particular attention to the third stanza,” he’d instruct. “That’s where he begins to make the language work for him.” “Don’t bother with Stevens yet,” he’d told her once when she picked a volume off his shelves in high school. “If you read him now, you won’t love him. Don’t deny yourself that falling in love.” But had she ever fallen in love with a poet, or a poem? When she was little, she asked her father in tears, “What if I don’t like poetry when I grow up?” fearing this would be the end for them. “Of course you’ll like poetry,” he told her, and she’d believed him. And she did like poetry. But she felt she didn’t love poetry as she ought to. What if she couldn’t love his poems?

Looking at the fire, and the possibilities it presented, she became aware of her pulse. The thrill of a bad idea. One’s body telling one to act. Fight or flight. But how to know which action it was recommending? Childhood had been so ripe with opportunities for disobedience. What opportunities had the past seven years of her life—her trial adulthood—presented? A gradual diminution in photo copying responsibilities, an ever-fluctuating stream of anxiety and anxiety medication, a haze of cigarette hangovers and haircuts she couldn’t afford, afternoons spent in Laundromats reading Susan Sontag at the recommendation of some boy with only minimal comprehension, sex without foreplay and urinary-tract infections, air-shaft apartments with bathroom doors painted over so many times they wouldn’t shut. Was this, the loss of her father, the means of escape she’d been wishing for, a new opportunity to disobey, her own act of defiance in the making? She’d packed her party dress, for Christ’s sake. Her twenties, now, had something of a narrative arc: My father died, and everything changed.

She’d had violent fantasies before—tripping, shoving, plate shattering—but they’d remained fantasies. Having no siblings, Flora had never hit or been hit. She pulled back the screen. She could throw one page, one poem, on the fire and see how it felt. Once she’d pinched Georgia hard on the arm, and her fingertips had left a dark purple welt that so appalled her, she didn’t speak to Georgia for a full day, as if she had been the one responsible. Just the title page, perhaps. Nothing of substance would be lost.