Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

Except for the time it takes to open the house, admitting wind and the deafening relaxing noise of the surf, I act more or less as if my mother is present. I get that Old Thompson and sit down on my sofa and look at her spot on hers, turn on her lamp. Ashtray, no drink, no cigarette, no book. I sit back down. I miss her — oddly, I think at first, but then I see that I miss her only as if she were a lover. How nice to come to a house like this with a woman in it you could both talk to and have. I don’t want just the one, either one, without the other. I am, as I say, an amateur at seizing opportunity.

I sat and regarded my position in the world, what was expected of me and what I expected. Was I going to be someone who cashed and wrote checks, on time and late, large or small, with those other check writers around him, in time and space until he died, or was I going to figure something out? Was I going to design buildings in Atlanta that either were on an address called Peachtree or had the word Peachtree on them, and be moderately well known in the Southern Living Who’s Who, or was I going to snap my fingers and wake at 3 A.M. one night and agree on an obscure bit of rhetoric with Aristotle? I was going to have another Thompson clock winder before any of it.

At the sideboard I was enfiladed by an epiphany. The liquor in the cut glass looked like pine resin and it didn’t smell much different. I looked in its amber facets. Liquor was a thing that dissolved you agreeably into place, into accepting, if not finally loving, the place you found yourself. It amounted to a magic potion that rendered any local hell into a species of heaven. That I knew about. That anybody who knew anything about liquor knew about. What was harder to see — possible only in rare lucid moments when looking at a decanter of whiskey become a slurry of pine resin — was that the passion for place itself was deluded; the idea that some configuration of geography, property, and the attendant means that secured it for you was going to satisfy you was lunatic. Geography is not going to satisfy. I thought of the lugubrious Wawer historians who thought that if only Mr. Sherman had not burned the hallowed salvation that was place. … The truth was, Sherman had nearly single-handedly liberated a clan of self-elected, inbred, unimaginative white slaves (slaves, to the second power, of place) from their central, crucifying delusion. And today a large Greek Revival portico with a sky-blue ceiling and forty outbuildings and landlocked seagoing fish in your hundred-year-old rice compounds and a cherry dining table thirty feet long and Merrill Lynch standing firmly behind it all is still not going to satisfy. As hard as that is to believe. And that is hard to believe. But looking into a liquor decanter, with liquor that looks like resin, and beautiful angles and refractions of my hand and of the room, its big empty breeziness a kaleidoscope of billowing drapes and knick-knacks, I believed it. I was once a student of literature. A character of whom I was fond makes a joke about this very epiphany. “You do not need to be justified,” he says — he means it biblically—“if you have a good car .” Drunk in my own beach house, I see that a good car, a good building, a good career, a good woman, a good … anything, will not justify me.

I wonder, before going to bed, if a revelation like this could lead to anorexia nervosa. Truth is, I have been a little overweight, right around the middle. On the other hand, one more drink and it would be time for breakfast — ravenous for eggs and bacon in the salt air, and seething resentment for General Sherman despite myself, and just about strung out enough to call someone up and weep on the phone about the Wawer. It’s all attractive, on Thompson Time.

THE NEXT MORNING I went down to the shack. When you decide that place is fallacy, not part of the solution to the vague, friendly unrest that we all have, all who don’t have specific, unfriendly unrest — and why more of us do not have specific, unfriendly unrest I’d like to know (did Elvis feel vague angst? No. The King did not. He felt he needed many pills — what’s wrong with that? — and he felt he should have a bowel movement sometime soon, to stay on his once-a-month schedule, which Nichopoulos Hippocrates had deemed adequate for a country boy of durable stock) — what you do when possessed of the notion that place is not the answer is get meaner place, so I went down to the shack.

It was mean. The tar paper had given up outside, dry, gray rips of it showing rusty-nailed diagonal wood underneath, and inside, the newspaper was still on the walls but it was very yellow, nearly tobacco-colored, and I found it hard to believe I had once been able to read the stories. The copy I had read easily as a child was not to be read now. I didn’t know if the yellowing had been accelerated by the cabin’s vacancy or what, or if, like the Sistine Chapel, it just needed a good wipe down. The shack smelled like a rat, a big, dry, clean, country rat, but still a rat. I closed it back up. In front of it was a chair and I took a seat. The surf was brilliant and rough and very pleasing. The sun was … round. I wanted something but did not know what. Why do we want what we do not know we want? Where did we pick this trick up? Is it the evolutionary mark of humanness? Imagine a dog, even a monkey, wanting something he just can’t put his finger on. A broad-backed, ebony-faced lowland gorilla saying, “It’s on the tip of my tongue …”

I want to know what is going on. That is what I want. Then I’d reason what to want. What is going on. What the big picture is here. It seems to me trivial whether you won or lost the Wawer, or like the Audi over the BMW, or are a lesbian staked out with wet-leather thongs by U.S. government Indians instead of a bride picking out her silver, if you don’t have the big picture. I do not have the big picture.

What I have to do, I suppose, is not want the big picture. That would free me to elect the BMW, the Chantilly, the tomato futures, the European Wanderjahr (it’s my time, I’m afraid), the partnership with the post-and-beam revival boys in Litchfield or the I-beam-and-skin boys in Atlanta; to contribute to the forest fund, elephant fund, whale fund, turtle fund, United Negro College Fund, UNICEF, Save the Children, Band-Aid, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, choice, choice, choice.

The sand at the feet of the chair is damp, clean, squeaky in its shearing with my feet. It is like sugar, but tastes more, I know, of salt. A few million cubic tons of the world’s finest rock salt. I’m on it. Squeaking my feet in it. This is the picture I have, the only picture I have. No one should have to suffer life with a head this small. There’s a shark a hundred yards from me in four feet of water who could eat me alive, who knows more than I do. He certainly knows his big picture. Mr. Shark is a sharp and fortunate fellow.

I think of something yellow, yellow and tasty: it is time — the little picture comes in clear — for those eggs.

A phrase of my old man’s: “Manage the screw-up quotient. That’s what life is. Deft management of the screw-up quotient.” But that son of a bitch knows what goes in the denominator and what goes in the numerator, and I do not. He knows what’s going on, in other words. I dislike him. He’s okay, you understand. But … no. There’s another way. For now, soft scrambled eggs, heavy pepper, neat whiskey.

Before I get to discover there are no eggs or anything else solid in the house, the phone rings. I am accustomed to the answering machines of friends at school, the screens. We don’t have a screening machine down here at the beach. I pick it up.