David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“That was back when giants walked the earth,” he said. “Nowadays I’m content to sit up here and watch the passing parade.”

“Are you? I worry about you.” She turned to me. “Is he?”

“What a thing to ask,” he said. “ ‘Is he a bitter old man?’ What do you expect her to say to that?”

“I think your father’s amazing,” I said.

“See that?” he said. “Amazing. Now let me show you the inside. We’re going to put you in the Holding Tank.” He went around to get her bag.

“I’m assuming he means the basement,” I said. “It’s really comfortable.”

“I don’t know how you live with it,” she said. “I mean I love him and everything.”

“I guess we’re a lot alike,” I said.

“You and him? Or you and me?”

“Well—both. We both care about him.”

“Yeah, that,” she said. “Can we talk sometime?”

After he went up to bed, she helped me put away stuff from the dishwasher and pointed to a bottle of Rémy on a top shelf. “Would it be okay?”

“Pour me some too,” I said. “Snifters are over in that cupboard.”

I took an end of the sofa, thinking she’d join me, but she took her high-tops off, got into the leather armchair and put her stocking feet up. “So here we are again,” she said.

“More or less,” I said. “Is it strange seeing him in a new place?”

“I don’t know, maybe less so. In a way. Could we have some music? If we put it on low?”

“What do you like?”

“You choose. Not jazz.”

“I’m with you on that.” I put on Rumours , since who didn’t like Rumours , except probably my husband. “This okay?”

“I guess. What is it?”

“You’re as bad as your father.” I handed her the jewel case.

“Oh right,” she said. “That’s them? She’s pretty. I mean, they’re all pretty. Listen, I know I said I wanted to talk, but do you mind if we just kind of be here?”

“Of course not. I’m a little tired myself.”

“Am I keeping you up?”

“No, I’m just—I don’t know what I am.”

She got out of the chair and picked up her sneakers. “I’m keeping you up.” She pointed to the jewel case. “Can I take that down with me, for my Walkman? I want to hear it.”

“No, stay,” I said. “I’m enjoying it too.”

“We both need to go to bed,” she said. “I didn’t even realize.”

I missed saying goodbye to her in the morning, when her father drove her to the train. I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, and around three in the morning I finally got up and drank more Rémy—and, I have to say, masturbated in my workroom—then didn’t wake up until ten o’clock. I looked for the Fleetwood Mac CD on the shelves, then in the guest room. Maybe I’d given it to her and not remembered. Or had I meant to give it to her and she’d somehow known?

—

In good weather, I’d bring coffee out to the deck and read the Times; part of his morning routine was to trot down the half mile of driveway, get our copy from the box, then run back up and shower. Then I’d look out across the river and watch the light creep down the mountain as the rattlesnakes came out to take the sun. I’m just being imaginative here: of course it was too far to see them, and they might after all have been just a local legend, and the earth turns too slowly for anyone to detect the creeping of daylight. Once I believed I saw a tiny figure making its way up a cliff and had the insane thought that it was my first husband. When I was done dawdling, I’d get down to business. You can watch the creeping of the word count at the bottom of the screen. Three hundred fifty-three, three hundred fifty-eight. And then, when the sun got too strong, the deck too hot, I went inside to my new room of one’s own. My husband’s door would already be closed, the music in there already going.

My first idea was a book to be called 5 Blondes . The figure 5, not spelled out: I think I had something in mind about women being commodified. Meditations on five women, real and imaginary: Marion Crane, Sylvia Plath, Blondie (not Deborah Harry, the one in the comic strip), Jayne Mansfield and myself. (Marilyn Monroe had been done to death, no pun intended.) I’d have to trust to my ingenuity to make it all hang together, though first I’d have to trust to my ingenuity to come up with things to think about them. Three of them came to bad ends, there was one thought, which they had deserved because of sexual transgression—wasn’t that how the culture read their stories?—while Blondie and I went on and on, to no end at all. Blondie was drawn by an artist named Chic Young, and I planned to make much of the notion that Blondie looked both chic and young, despite the housedresses. Yet she was so stupid that only Dagwood would want her. She never had an affair—of course, what did you expect in a comic strip?—or even a flirtation. Not that Dagwood seemed to want her either, so I guess there was her punishment. Which left me —this was going to be the personal part. How I fit in was that I’d dyed my hair blond when I was sixteen, then let it grow back out.

Another try: Medusa’s Daughters (a title I changed to Daughters of Medusa because it sounded more resonant), about images of angry-faced women. I had the Statue of Liberty, the woman on the Starbucks logo—both of them now look more blank than angry to me—and when The Fellowship of the Ring came out I added Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, with her face in psychedelic negative, ranting about how all would love her and despair. I was going to argue that repressed anger was the true solution to the mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile, but once I had that thought I couldn’t take it any further.

Still another try: Brides of Bluebeard (which I changed to Bluebeard’s Brides because it sounded less pretentious), about the old movies I’d seen with my husband in which women found themselves married to evil men. I’d read The Runaway Bride , by Elizabeth Kendall, and this was to be its sinister counterpart. Loretta Young in The Stranger , where Orson Welles is a Nazi who’s managed to lose his accent, Grace Kelly in Dial M of course, Gaslight, Rosemary’s Baby and borderline cases like Rebecca and Suspicion and Jane Eyre —all of which had Joan Fontaine, so maybe it should actually be about her? This book would have a personal part too, but I would’ve had to decide what I thought about my own marriage, and I’m still having trouble with that. (See above. See below.)

I should throw out my notes for these projects—God only knows how many thousands of words on floppy disks, the computers on which they were written being long dead—lest anybody should read them when I’m dead, but who might that be? My brother’s home-schooled spawn? Anyway, I doubt I’ll be feeling this shame on the other side: triteness will be the least of the sins for which I’ll be called to account. “It’s always rough going at first,” my husband used to tell me. “You have to write through the self-loathing.” I hated to hear myself complaining to him, but I think he liked it; he got to be supportive and wise, without being threatened by my actually accomplishing anything. This is the version in which he hates me for being a woman—and if that’s too harsh a view of what was going on, I suppose it’ll get straightened out for me when we’re no longer seeing through a glass darkly. The other version is the one in which he knows he’s a failure too. Peekskill had been his last commission, and what was he supposed to do—sit there designing imaginary museums and concert halls for the use of imaginary people? So day after day he went in and painted, and even I could tell his canvases were as trite as my own projects: he worked at them simply to be working. If I resented his finding some pleasure in that, and there’s no “if” about it, then I guess that tells you what a bad wife I was, and what a crabbed spirit. I mean, no wonder the writing came to nothing. Apparently you need some joy in order to get anything off the ground, though I have to say that my husband’s joy—that’s what he called it, and he must have known—in giving himself over to his shapes and colors, with the music carrying him along, never made his results any better. There must have been a few hundred paintings in that storage unit, and that was back in my time.