Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

I asked Ronnie why people want their hair so short, and he said it was convenience. “People don’t want to spend time with their hair.” Ronnie is mistaken, I think. These men are self-primpers. Every two weeks they are willing to drive all the way to Oldfield and wait for an hour in a chair, staring at their enormous square knees, insisting that their hair be as short as it can possibly be; whereas I get mine cut, and then I forget about it for five months. They seem to enjoy the prickliness — you see them fondling their skulls when they walk out the door. Marines, so Ronnie told me, generally want their hair mown shorter than any other group of military men. They want to look like penile tubes of warmongeringness. I basically want nothing to do with all men except my son, my father, and a few others. Robert Service, the poet, I like. Anyway, that’s why Henry and I usually go to have our haircuts at Sheila’s.

Good morning, it’s 5:07 a.m. I’m snoring a lot, and it’s keeping Claire awake. She used to say that it was her bedside light that bothered me, but it’s gone beyond that now. Probably I snore because I have more fat on the end of my epiglottis, making it floppier.

My grandfather was a great snorer. In his youth, he had ambitions to find a cure for some major disease, which brought him to medical school, and he ended up a research pathologist specializing in fungal diseases of the nose and brain. When I was fifteen, he began paying me to help him proofread his gigantic and wondrously expensive book, Fungal Disease in Humans . My grandmother had finally said, after twenty years of doing proofreading and correspondence for him, that she’d had enough. I became one of the few teenagers who could spell rhinoentomophthoromycosis— “rhino” because the malady begins in the nose. A number of the diseases that my grandfather studied had first appeared in the early nineteen-fifties after overeager pharmacologists, wanting to believe that steroids were the new miracle drugs, administered them in huge doses, sometimes in African and South American countries. Dosed with a sufficiently heavy course of some corticosteroids, one’s immune system stops functioning, and then the hyphae, or creepers, of normally innocent organisms like bread mold take root and grow through the veins and arteries and into the brain, causing blockages and dead places. The pictures of the doomed sufferers are horrible.

My grandfather’s other textbook was a compendium of tips and tricks for doing better postmortem examinations, copiously illustrated by a nice man who loved houseplants, and printed on special paper that could be rinsed if you got blood and gook on it. The way to make steady money in the textbook business is to bring out a new edition of your book every two years, whether it needs it or not. Otherwise your book competes with all the used copies of your book that are available for resale. I helped my grandfather with these successive editions, and then, after my job-hunting leads didn’t pan out, he got me a position at the publishing company that had brought out his books. And now twenty years later what am I? I’m an editor of medical textbooks. The job pays seventy thousand dollars a year and it isn’t terribly difficult. Of course doctors are smart in many ways, but a lot of them are also, in my experience, silly credulous people who need to be told what to think by a textbook, until a different textbook tells them to think differently.

Once when I was just married, I read an Agatha Christie and two Dick Francises, and I thought I should get up early and write a murder mystery about fungal diseases. I imagined a plot like an elaborate machine — like one of those works of mechanical art in airports, in which billiard balls move around on wire tracks, turning windmills and setting off chimes. I filled a silver glass — one of a pair that had been a wedding present — with cold water, and I took a piece of soft wheat bread from out of the bag, and I went to a chair by a window, where I sat looking at the streetlit sunrise, and tried to write about fungus-related death. The condensation on the silver water glass made patterns that I studied closely: it grew a fuzz of tiny droplets, like a reindeer’s antler, and then one droplet would break ranks and join with another, and suddenly a bigger dome of a drop, which had sucked in some of its surrounding fuzz and become too heavy to hold its place on the silver surface, slid down an inch, then gathered more strength and, changing direction to avoid an invisible point of resistance, slid another inch. Eventually there were five or six of these trails, and as I sipped the water the lowering of the level of the liquid would influence the texture of the droplets and the trails on the outer surface.

So I sat looking out at the dim world, eating wheat bread and drinking cold water, hoping to come up with a first chapter, where the dead body is discovered. I wrote fourteen pages. Then Claire and I began to notice a puzzlingly sweetish smell in our apartment. It got worse. We told the building manager that we suspected that a raccoon had died on the roof. The manager walked the roof and found nothing. Then came the hideous black flies, the biggest I’d ever seen. The woman next door stuffed a towel in the crack under her door to block the stench. We thought maybe the solid-waste plant down the road had had a mishap. But it turned out that the man below us had died. I thought, I don’t want to write a murder mystery with a plot like a machine; I don’t want a corpse lying there pushing a little imaginary world into gear.

The Postmortem Handbook , my grandfather’s small but steady seller, was translated into Spanish. He believed that what the world needed, above all, was more autopsies. He told us this at Christmas and he told us this at Thanksgiving; he told us this while sitting on a deck chair cruising up the Rhine. Better diagnoses, handier surgeons, wiser doctors, happier patients, all would result from more autopsies. In his will he ordered that an autopsy be performed on his body, as indeed it was. But once he said to me: “Fluorescent light is bad for the eyes. Pick a life that gets you outdoors.” I work all day in fluorescent light; it isn’t so bad. But maybe that’s why I crave this fire, which is hissing nicely after I stuffed in more of yesterday’s cardboard box.

My grandfather was a determined walker, and he sang Purcell songs rather breathlessly while he walked—“I’ll Sail upon the Dog-star” and “I Attempt from Love’s Sickness to Fly-hi-hi-high in Vain.” Later he grew vague and didn’t sing anymore, and he began advocating compulsory world disarmament and walking up to smokers in restaurants saying, “Do you enjoy killing yourself?” He continued to practice the piano, however — he played a certain Chopin E-minor prelude over and over in the basement. When my grandmother broke her back and was in bed wondering whether to call the ambulance, my grandfather retreated downstairs to perform Chopin’s E-minor prelude several times. As the rest of his mind closed up shop, the musical node carried on.

Once when I was fourteen I arrived at my grandparents’ house after twelve hours on a bus. We sat down to dinner. I politely asked my grandfather how his medical work was coming along. “I’m considering whether I should embark on a new research program,” he said. “It seems to me that an effective cure for the facial lesions of adolescence would be a contribution to humanity. I notice for instance that you have a number of acne pustules there on your forehead, and on your nose, and I wonder whether you think this disease might yield a fruitful program of research.” I said, “Well, yes.” Then came the dear, nervous laugh from my grandmother.