OVERCOATS
Richard N Bentley |
 |
"AREN'T YOU TAKING A LITTLE MORE THAN YOU ALREADY NEED?"
Baxter's wife said. She stared into the car, shielding her eyes, while Baxter brushed snow off the rear window with his mitten. Inside the car, two pairs of skis lay across the seatbacks--the downhills and the cross-countries--with the appropriate poles. The boots that went with each pair lay on the back seat next to the rubber galoshes, a set of L.L Bean lace-ups, and assorted gym shoes. Also in the back seat was a huge duffel bag stuffed with winter clothes, a pile of blankets, and two shopping bags filled with books. Some of the books had already spilled onto the floor of the car.
"Two weeks," he said. "You can get a lot done in two weeks." He pointed his mitten at her. " You always take books along when we go on weekends, and never read them. I am going to read these babies. Every one of them. I am going to read them down to the last page. Maybe get in some skiing, too. For mental health."
Baxter's eight-year-old son hunched up his shoulders and slapped his gloves together in the cold. He was wearing a new jacket, of which we will be hearing more later, and he said, "Will you write, Dad?"
"Will I write ?" Baxter's voice expressed mock outrage. "What else would I be doing at a Writers' conference in Vermont?"
"I mean," his son said, "Will you be writing to us ?"
"Sure," Baxter said. "Of course. I'll write as hard as I can."
It was January, the spiritless winter, full of short days and shorter tempers, but Baxter felt lighthearted and adventurous. The family was clear financially, he had managed to draw down some advance vacation time, and so he had filled out an application and submitted it to the writers' conference along with a poem and a check. The check had taken as long to write, caused him almost as much anguish, as the poem; but when he received a letter stating that "The Faculty Committee feels you might make good use of the program," he decided to go, ignoring the letter's obvious ambiguities.
"You'll be gone how long?" his wife had asked.
"Two weeks."
"Two weeks." She sat at the kitchen table eating a carrot. "They're going to teach you how to write poetry in two weeks?"
"Not teach," Baxter said. "They can't teach poetry. They can't really teach you anything. What I need is something like a community, a sense of--this is hard to explain--a sense of audience to visualize, an audience that I can imagine when I write a poem, so I won't feel so alone and futile. That's it. I need to make myself able to imagine an audience." It was, as he had said, hard to explain.
"Why don't you try to imagine us? His wife said. "Home alone, two little children without their father and all the hassles with the children's carpool while I'm at work. What do I tell the Harrisons about the carpool?"
"Oh, God," Baxter said. "Don't tell the Harrisons where I'm going. They'll think I've been defeated by the rat race. Just tell them something they can understand. Tell them I left you."
When Baxter awoke the second morning of the conference, he got up and stood for a long time before the window.
He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city, that the beauty of the winter morning seemed savage and foreign. Vermont's distant hills and studded conifers suggested a Siberian setting, and the strong sun, pouring its light into the quadrangle, struck the brick buildings of the campus with an intensity as commanding as a searchlight.
For a time, Baxter played with the Siberian analogy in his mind. It was not entirely satisfactory. In the Siberia that he imagined, the residents were subject to occasional acts of mercy from the regime in power, or from its successors. Party lines could be revised, the inhabitants could be set free, entire nations could be liberated.
But this particular gulag, this writers' workshop he was attending, contained people of a different sort. Far from family, friends and loved ones, with only peripheral access to newspapers, television, and basic sanitation, they were beholden to a cruel and lying regime from which there could be no escape. They were prisoners of the imagination, trapped in--Baxter's mind groped for a metaphor, "the eternal archipelago of literature"--and promptly rejected it.
Many events of the previous day--registration day--contributed to his sense of abandonment and gathering fear. The brittle hair-styles of the women at breakfast, hair partially dried and then frozen in the morning walk across campus, seemed to reflect the mass regimentation of a malevolent hairdresser. During the orientation sessions, the speaker prefaced his remarks by announcing that a lost earring had been discovered in the snow. He held up before the audience an object so large and extravagant in design that the ear seemed to be still attached.
That evening, as Baxter took a shower, he tried to think of a poem. All he could think of was decorum. How would he be perceived here? Frivolous, probably. Any exact account of his immaturity would reveal memories and thoughts of people he had loved, but they would be attached mostly to surface detail, places where he had loved them--beaches, waiting rooms, airports. Was this enough for poetry? Could decorum be transformed into a mode of speech? Probably not.
He stepped from the shower and was beginning to towel off, when a woman in a dirty uniform burst into the lavatory, almost tripping over her mop and clanking pail. As Baxter brushed his teeth, she maneuvered the mop around his toes in such a vigorous manner that he felt the need to reassure her.
"Thanks," he said. "You're doing great work."
"Oh," she replied, "Thank you . We're not the normal person who does the bathrooms." Her expressions revealed deranged lines accenting the eyes,.
The wind moaned around the windows as she continued her mopping, as if nature itself required him to say something more. But he wasn't so crazy that he didn't know how uninteresting his anxiety would be to most people, the banality of evil being far exceeded by the banality of neurosis.
"How long are we going to allow ourselves to be treated like this?" the woman demanded. The radiator clanked and sputtered.
"It's not the money," she continued angrily, "It's the way we are treated. We told the program director he was kidding himself about his reasons for wanting to expand the visiting writers program. He thought he was being altruistic, and we thought it had more to do with wanting big names. We've published a bit in our day," she grumbled. "But no, it will never do even to allude to our problems as visiting writers. And obviously you don't care about that. So all right, all right." She replaced the mop in the bucket, with a gesture of sarcastic deference. The upper body inclination made her seem shorter than she really was.
"I'm sorry to hear this," Baxter said. "It must be excruciating for you."
"Nor do we need your sympathy, sir, or your condescension to the tedium of the poet's life."
The next day, in an effort to allay his anxiety after a blizzard of seminars, workshops and lectures, he decided to try some exercise. Late that afternoon, he appeared at the gym, self-consciously attired in a sweatsuit. He joined in with the basketball players. Some of them moved adroitly, the gestures timed and well-practiced, but there were enough like himself, flinging the ball up randomly and missing by wide margins, that he began to feel almost easy, almost triumphant.
After awhile, he noticed a young man who was aiming at the backboard quite slowly and deliberately. He would take his time, set his feet look up toward the basket, bounce the ball once or twice, then set himself again. He was sinking the fifteen-footers with astonishing regularity because, unless Baxter was mistaken, he was the same young man, a poet, that Baxter had observed walking slowly across the campus with a white cane, often with someone at his side.
Baxter watched as the poet flexed his legs and hurled the ball upward. The shot missed, and the ball rebounded directly into Baxter's hands. The poet seemed to know where the ball was.
"Could you bounce it over?" he asked. "If you pass it with a bounce, I can hear it."
The poet took aim. Once again he missed, but not by much. Baxter hurried after the ball, then strolled up and handed it to him.
"How do you do that?" Baxter asked. It immediately occurred to him that the question was impulsive and rather tactless. He thought it might be acceptable in the casual atmosphere of a gym and in light of his guileless curiosity. Also, the poet himself had brought up the subject.
"I can hear it," the poet said.
"Hear it?"
"Sure."
He set himself, and took aim, pausing long enough to let Baxter ask him, " How can you hear it?"
"I just hear it."
He bounced the ball on the floor and caught it with both hands.
"You can hear the rim of a basketball hoop? When you aim at it?"
The poet smiled. Then he started to laugh. "I'm putting you on. But I can sure hear the swish when the ball goes through."
He let fly.
Swish .
They took a few more shots, introduced themselves, then headed outside. Baxter held the poet's coat for him at the door, noticing how it resembled his own, but looked at least ten years older. He, himself, must be ten years older than the poet, he thought.
The afternoon gloom had lowered. The wind was coming from behind them, at the same speed they were walking, and the snow was flaky and slow, its movement more horizontal than vertical. They seemed to be moving without moving, following a course that took them in a circle. Paths that had been shoveled were already covered by snow, and the poet's white cane made cautious forward arcs. He had declined Baxter's arm when it was offered.
The poet's story began when he was about the same age as Baxter's own son, eight years old. He had begun to feel sick much of the time, with dizziness and vomiting. His nausea was interpreted, by his angry and divorcing parents, as a reaction to their marital troubles. The child psychologist to whom he was sent was unable to diagnose the brain tumor immediately, and the delay led to the need for drastic surgery. He still retained, he told Baxter, partial vision in one eye.
They were now walking slowly along a path that led from the gym to the dormitories. The walkway seemed more treacherous now. The banks stood two or three feet high on either side.
"Please be careful," Baxter said. "These paths are dangerous."
"I'll be okay. Is this my dormitory? If it is, I'll leave you here and go back to the Braille. I do my first drafts on a Braille typewriter. I need the feel of the poem on my fingers."
"How do you find the time to write up here? All the workshops, seminars, readings?"
"You make the time," he said. "You have to be determined. Enjoyed talking to you."
Baxter felt the same way about taking to him, but it was difficult to imagine the source of the poet's enjoyment. All they had discussed, as far as Baxter could recollect, was the poet's blindness and his childhood pain.
As the days continued, the campus and its surroundings began to feel more comfortable. There was no party line of the imagination after all, and in the cafeteria, people would talk about their work in a subdued way, banter about their homes and families while exchanging wallet-sized photographs. One man was obsessed with real estate.
"I just can't get the listings," he would complain. "It's not the selling. That's the easy part. It's getting the listings. You have to know important people who like you and want to help you. You can't be off in some . . ." he laughed uneasily and looked around him, ". . .other world. It's all hustle, like getting published,"
At last, the final evening arrived with its brief ceremony. Baxter sat in the last row of chairs, near the back of the darkened reading room, a few spaces from where a small child was seated in her mother's lap. As the speakers read their works, he found himself playing a surreptitious game of monkey-see-monkey-do with the two-year-old. The child's efforts to distract him, to keep him from becoming restless and squirmy during the ceremony, were not entirely successful, because Baxter had lost his overcoat. He was furious and he wanted it back.
He had looked for it earlier on the coat rack outside the reading room, where he thought he had left it. Now, with the ceremony concluded, the lights on, and people gathering in small groups, he began his search more purposefully.
Trying to retrace is steps from earlier in the evening, he returned to the main hall where the graduation dinner had taken place. It was not in the small cloak room off the dining hall, nor had he any reason to believe it would be there. He had a clear memory of removing it from that place, shrugging it over his shoulders, and walking across the campus to the reading room. He was certain that he had hung it on the long row of hangers in the hallway outside that room, somewhere in the middle of the rack. But it wasn't there.
His exasperation grew toward a self-protective rage that tried to masquerade as tough-mindedness. As he moved back and forth between the hallway and the reading room, looking under chairs and tables, examining every coat that resembled his own, people began to notice his agitation.
"Hey, that's mine," someone said, as Baxter examined a coat on a chair. "It was mine the last time you looked at it, too."
He threw out his hands foolishly. "I'm sorry. It's just becoming an obsession."
One young woman smiled in a kindly way as he slumped down next to her on a stuffed sofa. "I blame myself for everything, too," she said. "Don't worry. It'll show up."
"Except," Baxter said sourly, "by tomorrow everybody will be gone."
Somebody leaned across her, looked at Baxter intensely, and said, "Have you ever read The Overcoat , by Gogol?"
Baxter hadn't.
"It's a sad, sad story. It's the saddest story ever told."
Another person turned away from a small group of people and said, over his shoulder, "You know, that's interesting. I read somewhere that only we, here, in the twentieth century, find the story sad. Those nineteenth century Russians took the guy to be something of a jerk. They laughed at him."
"It's still the saddest story ever told," insisted the first.
"Jerk," said the other. "A sad jerk."
Baxter had no taste for this. Excusing himself, he continued the search, but when he finally went to bed, after once again retracing his steps across the campus to the dining hall, he was still without his overcoat.
As he lay on the bed, fully clothed but with the lights out, a memory began to shape itself. It was the memory of an afternoon approximately two months before, a pleasant autumn afternoon, a Saturday. He was with his children on a museum excursion in the city. Sleep would not come for him as his memory rotated with the cycle of the incident which involved--once again--a lost outer-garment. A jacket belonging to his eight-year-old son.
His three-year-old daughter was also present at the McDonald's. As she dipped Baxter's tea bag into her orange drink, she was saying, "I love everybody." She continued in a singsongey tone, seemingly mesmerized by the bobbing tea bag and addressing no one in particular, "I love everyone in my family. I love my Dad. I love my Mom. I love my brother. I love myself. I love my cat. I love my house. I love everything."
"Do you even love your stuffed frog?" her brother asked.
She looked at him, puzzled. "I don't have a stuffed frog, Nicholas."
Her elbow nudged some broken cookies off the table. They landed in Baxter's lap. He asked Julia if she would allow Nicholas to read to them from the Happy Meal Box.
"I'll only let him read it . . . if he invites me . . . to his next birthday party."
"Okay," Nicholas said. "You can come." Julia handed him the container with its cartoon figures, puzzles, mazes, and bright aphorisms. He studied it. Baxter popped one of the cookies into his mouth.
"Those are mine," the children complained in unison.
"Then what are they doing in my lap? "Baxter said.
"Dad, Dad, said Nicholas. "You're supposed to be on a diet."
"These are on my diet. Doctor Baxter's Junk Food Diet. Six Happy Meals a day, ten glasses of water, and all the cookies you can eat. These are high in--what's it called?--fiber? Try one." They began to discuss therir weights. Baxter reminded Nicholas of a time when it seemed he would weight thirty pounds for the rest of his life. Then, suddenly, it was forty, then forty-five, then sixty.
"How much does Julia weigh?" Nicholas asked. Baxter could not remember, so he questioned her. Julia smiled pleasantly and held up both fists, gradually extending her fingers, one by one in an inquiring way.
"That's ten, Julia," Nicholas said. "Even Smokey, the cat, weighs more than that."
Julia looked thoughtful, then blurted out, "Ninety-ten pounds?"
"Maybe she's been lifting weights," Nicholas said, enjoying her. "Hey, Dad, Dad. Can you tell us the story about the little green man?"
Later on they discovered the loss of the jacket. Could they have left it at the McDonald's? They retraced their steps. It was mid-afternoon, balmy, with no wind. Baxter stormed through "Don't Walk" lights at intersections, a child in each hand. The manager at the McDonald's had no jacket in his Lost and Found. Back at the museum, Baxter questioned corridor guards, ticket takers, uniformed officials with walkie-talkies, ladies in smocks selling postcards. No one had seen it, no one had found it, no one had turned it in.
Its cost rested heavy on Baxter's mind. It had been purchased two days before, to replace a jacket that Nicholas had lost two days before that . Baxter was not being kind about it, for it seemed that each time he delivered himself of a barrage of stern parental commentary Nicholas would turn lighthearted within a few moments, as if forgetting what he had forgotten. In a cadenced voice, Baxter reminded Nicholas of his obligations, now that he was eight years old, to keep track of his own things. Baxter enumerated the many services that Nicholas' parents had provided for him in his infancy that should now no longer be necessary. Baxter spoke of future parental services, as well as individual privileges, that could hardly be bestowed on an eight-year-old so scatterbrained.
A wisecrack lingered in Baxter's memory--a limpid, pointless joke that had shot out of his mouth as the three of them stood in the museum, toward closing time, facing a skeleton-model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The remark somehow linked the enormity of his son's offense with the scale of the prehistoric animal, the size of the jacket such an animal might have worn in those Cretaceous times, the likelihood of its being lost. Whether ruefully humorous or not, the comment's effect on Baxter's son was devastating.
"All right !" Nicholas cried out at last, clenching his fists. Then he sat down on the short, stone barrier that separated them from the display and, with his head in his hands, the tears came. They would not stop--nothing could stop his crying, not even his sister, who had previously seemed to be slightly enjoying his discomfiture. Now she approached Nicholas tenderly, sat down next to him, and touched his forearm. She looked back at Baxter with dark and serious eyes.
Because Nicholas was Baxter's first-born, Baxter was not fully aware that an eight-year-old and a jacket are mutually inhospitable, especially in early autumn when the weather might call for a jacket in the morning and a light cotton shirt in the afternoon. This particular afternoon, the second-grader's thoughts might even have been concentrated on an opportunity for a wandering and dreamy afternoon of intimacy with his father and sister, in an undisciplined world of food in astonishingly garish boxes, long stories on park benches about little green men, and the random wonderment of a museum. Such an afternoon had now been ruined. But it was not the absent jacket that had ruined it.
As Baxter played the memory, trying to retract the impulsive comment or at least to rephrase it less hurtfully, he became increasingly troubled and sleepless. His memory revolved with this incident and the incident refused to change. It refused to transform itself into anything other than a small vision of the world's injustices and his own complicity in them. His son was both his past and his future, and it seemed as if they had been cast out on a very precarious limb together. Baxter could not fall asleep.
He decided to make one last search for the missing overcoat.
The lights were still blazing in the deserted reading room where the graduation had taken place. On a table by the wall, a bowl of hardening cheese dip, with a lopsided floret of broccoli stuck in it, rested beside a jug of white wine in a plastic tub of melted ice. Baxter looked under the table, then circled the room, eyeing the chairs.
In the outside hallway he saw an overcoat. It was in the exact location where he remembered leaving his own, now conspicuous in the long line of empty wire hangers. It hung in the middle of the rack, a similar color, but a shabbier version of his own overcoat. Everyone had left the party, one overcoat had remained. Baxter seized it with the same violence he now felt toward its careless and probably wine-woozy owner. First, he all but strangled the coat for causing him such a night of deep disquietude. Then, as he wrestled it off the hanger, to make off with it, ransom it perhaps, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Baxter searched the coat's pockets for evidence of ownership. There was none. He bent down to pick up the paper, but it was blank on both sides. Baxter started to crumple it, then decided to return it to the coat's pocket. The blank piece of paper seemed strange. It was thick and rough-textured. Holding it closer to his eyes, he noticed tiny marks and indentations, but his eyes told him less than the feel of it on his fingers.
He returned the slip of paper, with its braille markings, into the pocket, and put the jacket back on the hanger. A sad jerk! That's what he was! For the second time that evening, rage was transformed to distress. But this time, when the sadness came, it was of a different quality--a strange, deep, calming kind of sadness that made sleep possible and welcome. Somewhere, miles away, his son lay asleep, dreaming perhaps of prehistoric animals and journeys of discovery. It seemed they could be capable of great intimacy now.
The next morning, Baxter made one final inspection. On the hallway coatrack, the blind poet's overcoat, which he had wanted to steal the night before, was missing. In its place, on exactly the same hanger, was Baxter's. It seemed like a merciful intercession. As he stood there he tried to imagine the words he would choose to tell his son the overcoat story. The words might contain an apology, he hoped. He thought: This is my son, and he thought: This is my life. His son was eight years old, and waiting for all the things his father might try to tell him.
CC