David Gates - Jernigan

He waited for me to say something.

Finally he said, “It’s a sort of a horns-of-a-dilemma situation in regards to the ethics of it. On the one hand, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s chances, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”

“That bad,” I said.

“I’m going to tell you something for your guidance,” he said. “This had been contemplated last year, at the time you had your tragedy. And we felt at that time that A, it simply wouldn’t be right at such a time, and we also wondered very frankly, and forgive me for saying this, which I don’t mean any disrespect, if you might not have been having problems in the home which might in turn have a bearing on the other problems. And that conceivably, given time …” Which was as far as he got in imagining Jernigan transformed. “But,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

“May I be frank?” he said. “I really don’t like you. And if I’d been listened to when Mr. Chittenden wanted to take you on, you would have never been taken on. I just thought I should pass that on as part of the total picture.”

“So that’s what this is really about?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But of course you’re welcome to think whatever makes you feel better.”

“Ten years,” I said.

“Long time,” he said.

I decided to try that thing you always heard about in high school. Absolutely nothing to lose at this point. “Well, fuck you very much,” I said.

And damned if it didn’t work. “For what?” he said.

Back in the outer office, Miranda looked up and raised her eyebrows by way of question.

“Son cosas de la vida,” I said, a phrase I picked up from Naked Lunch . Commute for this long and you’ll read pretty much anything. I’d been through the P. G. Wodehouse period, the Chesterton period, the fucking Lamb-Hazlitt-De Quincey period. Naked Lunch was from the Reread Everything You Read in High School period. Though I mostly just reread the dirty parts, still half afraid they’d make me a homosexual.

“You’re going to think this is a really inappropriate time,” Miranda said, “but I think I have to tell you that he isn’t actually being cheap or anything. This actually does erase, but I sort of use the white-out for moral reasons. Because I don’t think you can just backtrack and undo your mistakes like that.”

This got my attention. In all the months she’d been here, I’d never understood that Miranda was crazy.

Well, so maybe crazy enough to see you outside the office.

“Interesting,” I said. “Interesting way of thinking about it. Listen, they’ve offered to let me come in for a few days more, but I think I’m just going to clean out some stuff now and bag it. Otherwise I think it’s just going to weird everybody out, including me. But I was thinking, sometime when I’m in the neighborhood why don’t I give you a call and we can go grab a cup of coffee or something.”

Fired after ten years and just coming out and blithely putting the moves on this Miranda. To the extent it was moves. To the extent it was blithe.

3

By noon I was back at Martha’s house. On the train, I’d gotten into this thing in my head that she was one of those Housewife Hookers you read about (though technically not a wife) and that this explained where the money came from. It made complete sense.

Inside I could hear music going. I rang the doorbell and whapped the knocker. Footsteps came trotting, Martha yelling “Just a minute!”

The other idea I had was that she was cuckolding me (if an unmarried man can, technically, be cuckolded) with Tim the Untimid: author, editor, moonshiner, New Adam and all-around timber wolf. Thinking, I suppose, of my sainted mother.

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in,” I cried, Jack Nicholson in The Shining .

“Peter?” she called. She opened the door a crack.

“The wand’ring O’Jernigan,” I said. “Make my bed soon, for I fain would lie down.” Oh, I had the bitch dead to rights. Noon, and she was naked, apparently, under her baby-blue terry-cloth robe.

She opened the door wide. “What are you doing home?”

Home?

I could hear now that the music was Webb Pierce. Which she’d given up trying to play with the kids in the house: Clarissa and Danny thought it was funny to howl along like lonesome ki-yotes.

“Fair question,” I said. “And now, my turn. What’s the door doing locked?” This was the same Jernigan, remember, who’d just been putting his approximation of moves on poor Miranda.

“You’re going to think this is really stupid,” she said. “I was just about to jump in the shower, and I still always lock every door in the house because of Psycho . And bolt the bathroom. Nowadays it actually makes some sense, but I was doing this when I was like thirteen. So how come you’re home, sweetie?”

“You haven’t invited me in,” I pointed out.

She gave me a look, then took my hand and led me inside.

I listened for the sound of a man scuttling out a window, or rustling in a closet as he waited for a propitious time to make his getaway. Like maybe while the faithless bitch was seducing me. If she now reached for old Dr. Johnson that would be a shit-sure sign. (I call it Dr. Johnson because I read it in Auden’s list of names for the genitals in A Certain World . Jernigan the Colorful.) Webb Pierce sang, But the one that I’m tied to was the first to be untrue . And I understood that she was defying me to pierce her web of deceit.

Of course it was just that I’d gone off on that thing in my head.

It must’ve been because I had just been fired. Odd as it seems that I might actually have taken to heart a thing anyone else would have taken to heart. Well, hell, anything to anchor you to the planet, right? Here’s how I reconstruct it: losing the job — ten years of having a place to go and things to do there — made me afraid nothing else could be counted on either. Except maybe afraid’s not right: maybe the opposite. Wanting everything to fall apart under me, leaving me in deep space. Wanting what you dread to come true. The twists and turns of Jernigan: what could be more interesting?

“You’re kidding,” said Martha, when I’d settled down enough to tell her what had happened. “How come?”

I shrugged. “Turns out they were going to get rid of me last year, only they took pity on me when, you know, there was the little incident.” Bound to bother another woman to hear me speak of it so slightingly. Though better that than to have to hear myself saying, oh so solemnly, when my wife died .

“Well I think it’s great,” she said. “And I think we ought to celebrate. Like to help me take that shower?”

So why not be human.

“Good God, woman,” I said, trying to get playful. “Don’t you realize that losing one’s job robs one of one’s symbolic manhood?”

“I’m not thinking about your symbolic manhood,” she said. “Ooh, I made him blush.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” I said. “This is serious, symbolic business here. See, for a real man the maw of unemployment is the symbolic equivalent of a big, snapping vagina dentata . Snap snap.” I made my hand into a mouth (thumb as upper jaw) and snapped at my crotch.

“You really do think that, don’t you?” she said, putting a companionable arm around me.

I shook my head. “Irony, irony,” I said. “With me, always assume irony.”

“Even when you say ‘always assume irony’?”

“Hey,” I said. “You’ve heard of the Liar Paradox? Well, this is the Ironist Paradox.”

“I love you,” she said. “Sans irony.”