Self-Defense (6 page)

“That’s it,” she said. “Now do you
understand my dream?”

“Not in the least.”

She looked at me and laughed. “Well,
that’s straight out.”

“Better no answer than a wrong one.”

“True, true.” Laughing some more, but her
hands were tense and restless and she tapped her feet.

“I guess I’m ticked off,” she said.

“About what?”

“Him in my dreams. It’s an... invasion.
Why now?”

“Maybe you’re ready, now, to deal with
your anger toward him.”

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully.

“That doesn’t feel right?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t think I’m
angry at him. He’s too
irrelevant
to get angry at.”

Anger had stiffened her voice. I said,
“The girl in the dream, how old is she?”

“Nineteen or twenty, I guess.”

“About your mother’s age when she married
him.”

Her eyes widened. “So you think I’m
dreaming about his violation of
Mother
? But Mother was blond and this
girl has dark hair.”

“Dreams aren’t bound by reality.”

She thought for a while. “I suppose it
could be that. Or something else symbolic—the young chicks he always chased—but
I
really
don’t think I’d dream about his girlfriends. Sorry.”

“For what?”

“I push you for interpretations and then
keep shooting them down.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s your dream.”

“Yes—only I wish it wasn’t. Any idea when
I’ll get rid of it?”

“I don’t know, Lucy. The more I know about
you, the better answer I can give you.”

“Does that mean I have to keep talking
about my past?”

“It would help, but don’t make yourself
uncomfortable.”

“Do I need to talk about
him
?”

“Not until you’re ready.”

“What if I’m never ready?”

“That’s up to you.”

“But
you
think it would be useful.”

“He was in the dream, Lucy.”

She started to crack a knuckle and stopped
herself.

“This is getting tough,” she said. “Maybe
I
should
call the psychic buddies.”

After she was gone, I thought about the
dream.

Somnambulism. Bedwetting.

Fragmented sleep patterns were often
displayed as multiple symptoms—persistent nightmares, insomnia, even
narcolepsy. But the sudden onset of her symptoms implied a reaction to some kind
of stress: the trial material or something the trial had evoked.

Her allusion to an incubus was
interesting.

Sexual intrusion.

Daddy abducting a maiden. Grinding noises.

A Freudian would have loved it: unresolved
erotic feelings toward the abandoning parent coming back to haunt her.

Feelings awakened because the trial had
battered her defenses.

She was right about one thing: This father
was
different.

And relevant.

I drove down toward the city, taking the
coast highway to Sunset and heading east to the University campus.

At the Research Library, I looked up M.
Bayard Lowell in the computer index. Page after page of citations beginning in
1939—the year he’d published his landmark first novel,
The Morning Cry—
and encompassing his other novels, collections of poems, and art exhibitions.

Covering all of it would take a semester.
I decided to start with the time period that corresponded to Lucy’s dream,
roughly twenty-two years ago.

The first reference was a book of poems
entitled
Command: Shed the Light,
published on New Year’s Day. The rest
were reviews. I climbed up to the stacks and began my refresher course in
American Lit.

In the poetry shelves, I found the book, a
thin gray-jacketed volume published by one of the prestige New York houses. The
circulation slip showed it hadn’t been checked out in three years. I went to
the periodicals section and lugged volume after volume of bound magazines to an
empty carrel. When my arms grew sore, I sat down to read.

Command: Shed the Light
turned out to be Lowell’s first book in
ten years, its predecessor an anthology of previously published short stories.
The New Year’s release date was also Lowell’s fiftieth birthday. The book had
attracted a lot of attention: six-figure advance, main selection by one of the
book clubs, foreign rights sold in twenty-three countries, even a film option
by an independent production company in Hollywood, which seemed odd for poetry.

Then came the critics. One major newspaper
called the work “self-consciously gloomy and stunningly amateurish and, this
writer suspects, a calculated effort on the part of Mr. Lowell to snare the
youth market.” Another, describing Lowell’s career as “glorious, lusty, and
historically indelible,” gave him credit for taking risks but labeled his verse
“only very occasionally pungent, more frequently vapid and sickening, morose
and incoherent. Glory has yielded to vainglory.”

Lots more in that key, with one exception:
A Columbia University doctoral student named Denton Mellors, writing in the
Manhattan Book Review,
rhapsodized “darkly enchanting, rich with lyric
texture.”

From what I could tell, Lowell hadn’t
reacted to the debacle publicly. A bottom-of-the-page paragraph in the January
twenty-fourth
Publishers Journal
noted that sales of the book were
“significantly below expectations.” Similar articles appeared in other
magazines, ruminating on the death of contemporary poetry and speculating as to
where M. Bayard Lowell had gone wrong.

In March, the
Manhattan Book Review
noted that Lowell was rumored to have left the country, destination unknown. In
June, a cheeky British glossy reported his presence in a small village in the
Cotswolds.

Having confirmed that the
sweatered-and-capped personage meandering among the sheep was indeed the
once-touted American, we tried to approach but were accosted by two rather
formidable mastiffs who showed no interest in our bangers-and-chips and
convinced us by dint of grease-and-growl to beat a hasty retreat. What has
happened, we wonder, to Mr. Lowell’s once insatiable Yankish appetite for
attention? Ah, fleeting fame!

Other foreign sightings followed
throughout that summer: Italy, Greece, Morocco, Japan. Then, in September, the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
announced that “Pulitzer prize-winning
author M. Bayard Lowell” would be relocating to Southern California and
contributing occasional essays to the supplement. In December, the Hot Property
column in the
Times
Real Estate section reported that Lowell had just
closed escrow on fifty acres in Topanga Canyon.

Sources say it is a heavily wooded, rustic
campsite in need of repair. Last utilized as a nudist colony, it is off the
beaten track and seems perfect for Lowell’s new Salingeresque identity. Or
maybe the author-cum-artist is simply traveling West for the weather.

May: Lowell attended a PEN benefit for
political prisoners, a “star-studded gala” at the Malibu home of Curtis App, a
film producer. Two more Westside parties in April, one in Beverly Hills, one in
Pacific Palisades. Lowell, newly bearded and wearing a blue denim suit, was
spotted talking to the current Playmate of the Month. When approached by a
reporter, he walked away.

In June, he delivered a keynote speech at
a literacy fund-raiser where he announced the creation of an artists’ and
writers’ retreat on his Topanga land.

“It will be a sanctum,” he said, “and it
will be called Sanctum. A blank palette upon which the gifted human will be
free to struggle, squiggle, squirt, splotch, deviate, divert, digress, dig in
the dirt, and howsoever indulge the Great Id. Art pushes through the hymen of
banality only when the nerves are allowed to twang unfettered. Those in the
know, know that the true luxuries are those of synapse and spark.”

A September piece in the
L.A. Times
entertainment section reported that a grant from film
producer App was financing construction of new lodgings at Sanctum. The
architect: a twenty-four-year-old Japanese-American prodigy named Claude
Hiroshima, whose last project had been the refurbishment of all the lavatories
in a Madrid hotel.

“At Sanctum,” he said, “my goal is to be
true to the essential consciousness of the locus, selecting materials that
provide a synthesis with the prevailing mental and physical geometry. There are
several log structures already on the property, and I want the new buildings to
be indistinguishable from them.”

Log structures.

Either Lucy had read about the retreat or
her brother had told her about it.

December, another
Publishers Journal
squib: Paperback publication of
Command: Shed the Light
was canceled and
sales of Lowell’s backlist—his previously published books—had bottomed, as had
prices for his canvases.

March:
The Village Voice
ran a
highly unfavorable retrospective of Lowell’s body of work, suggesting that his
place in history be reassessed. Three weeks later, a letter from someone named
Terrence Trafficant of Rahway, New Jersey, attacked the article, labeling the
author a “bloodsucking, motherfucking nematode” and hailing M. Bayard Lowell as
“the dark Jesus of twentieth-century American thought—all of you are just too
fucking blocked and preternaturally dense to realize it, you asshole-fucking
New York Jew revisionist Pharisees.”

July: Completion of construction at
Sanctum was announced by Lowell in the
L.A. Times Book Review.
The first
crop of Sanctum fellows was introduced:

Christopher Graydon-Jones, 27, sculptor in
iron and “found objects,” Newcastle, England.

Denton Mellors, 28, former doctoral
candidate in American Literature at Columbia University and critic for the
Manhattan Book Review;
“Mr. Mellors will complete work on his first novel,
The Bride.
”

Joachim Sprentzel, 25, electronic music
composer from Munich.

Terrence Gary Trafficant, 41, essayist and
former inmate at the New Jersey State Prison at Rahway, where he had been
serving a thirteen-year sentence for manslaughter.

Next day’s paper cared only about
Trafficant, describing how acceptance as a Sanctum Fellow had hastened the
ex-con’s parole and detailing Trafficant’s criminal history: robbery, assault,
narcotics use, attempted rape.

Jailed almost continuously since the age
of seventeen, Lowell’s protégé had earned a reputation as a combative prisoner.
With the exception of a prison diary, he’d never produced anything remotely
artistic. A photo showed him in his cell, tattooed hands gripping the bars: skinny
and fair, with long, limp hair, bad teeth, sunken cheeks, a devilish goatee.

Questioned about the appropriateness of
Trafficant’s selection, Lowell said, “Terry is excruciatingly authentic on
smooth-muscle issues of freedom and will. He’s also an anarchist, and that will
be an exhilarating influence.”

Mid-August: Sanctum’s opening was
celebrated by an all-night party at the former nudist colony. Catering by Chef
Sandor Nunez of Scones Restaurant, music by four rock bands and a contingent
from the L.A. Philharmonic, ambience by M. Bayard Lowell “in a long white
caftan, drinking and delivering monologues, surrounded by admirers.”

Among the sighted guests: a psychology
professor turned LSD high priest, an Arab arms dealer, a cosmetics tycoon,
actors, directors, agents, producers, and a buzzing swarm of journalists.

Terry Trafficant was spotted holding forth
to his own group of fans. His prison diary,
From Hunger to Rage,
had
just been bought by Lowell’s publisher. His editor called it “an intravenous
shot of poison and beauty. One of the most important books to emerge this
century.”

The New York police lieutenant who’d
arrested Trafficant on the manslaughter charge was quoted, too: “This guy is
serious bad news. They might as well light a stick of dynamite and wait for it
to blow.”

The next few citations on Lowell turned
out to be cross-referenced interviews with Trafficant. Describing himself as
“Scum made good, an urban aborigine exploring a new world,” the ex-con quoted
from the classics, Marxist theory, and postwar avant-garde literature. When
asked about his crimes, he said, “That’s all dead and I’m not an undertaker.”
Crediting Buck Lowell for his freedom, he called his mentor “one of the four
greatest men who ever lived, the other three being Jesus Christ, Krishnamurti,
and Peter Kurten.” When asked who Peter Kurten was, he said, “Look it up,
Jack,” and ended the interview.

The article went on to identify Kurten as
a German mass murderer, nicknamed the Däusseldorf Monster, who’d sadistically
raped and butchered dozens of men, women, and children between 1915 and 1930.
Kurten had other quirks, too, enjoying coitus with a variety of farm animals
and going to his execution hoping he could hear his own blood bubble at the
precise moment of death.