Joy Williams: 99 Stories of God

She met with him several times at his dacha at Komarovo, but tea was never offered.

Once she desperately had to use the toilet but was too shy to enquire after the facilities. After she left Berkov but before she walked the short distance to the station and the train that would return her to Leningrad, she relieved herself in the birch woods.

She was so shocked at the long, glistening coil of blond excrement that was produced from her body and lay as though it could be quite alive on the leafy forest floor that she abandoned intellectual life and lived the remainder of her days more or less in seclusion in Ithaca, New York, not far from the bridge from which so many despairing students jump.

A much-admired artist was giving a lecture to a large audience. His work was known for its peculiar cold beauty and its intellectual craftsmanship. He was the recipient of many awards and honors. He had received the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei’s Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize as well as the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales. He was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Education and Culture.

In his own country, he had received awards from the Academy of Achievement, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy. In one year alone, he won the triple crown of appreciation and adulation by racing off with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

At the point in his lecture where he was saying that the representative element in a work of art is always irrelevant, that for one to appreciate a work of art one must bring to it nothing from life, no knowledge of life’s affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions and desires, he was seized by the most stupefying boredom that he had to leave the stage.

She was studying the works of Robinson Jeffers. She considered him a great poet of nature and the sublime. He was an inhumanist, utterly disillusioned with human civilization. He believed that Jesus was a well-meaning teacher whose doomed mission to save mankind through a gospel of love was based on the deluded sense that he was the son of God.

Jeffers built his house and his tower of stone with the aid of his twin sons on the wild cliffs of Carmel, California, and planted two thousand trees there. His wife, Una, was described (by scholar Albert Gelpi) as “the ground, the air, the matrix and inspiration of Jeffers’ creation in stone and words, wife, mother, muse, anima.” She died in 1950, and he lived on until 1962.

She wished she could find some writer that she could be that important for — a great writer, of course. She was attracted to writers. She knew people thought of her as an old-fashioned girl.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, she went to a party and there were several writers there, all ancient, stooped, and a little hard of hearing but very sweet. One of them told her that he had visited Robinson Jeffers at Tor House with the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

“He was short, leathern and lean, with vague, slow-moving eyes,” the old fellow said. “The place was surrounded by ranch houses, lawn sprinklers, baby strollers, and painted ducks with wings that turned in the breeze.

“As we were about to leave after a desultory conversation, Jeffers said, ‘But you must see the tower! Una will take you. I’d go myself, but the climb has become too much for my heart.’

“And just then,” her new acquaintance said with a bit of a flourish, “Una appears with a bag of groceries. She gives us a piercing and entirely hostile glance and says, ‘Follow me then.’

“Over a beheaded hawk carved in stone, a great many pigeons are flying about. We pass under a low lintel, go up spiral stairs to a room showing no sign of human habitation. There was only the booming of surf and the cooing of pigeons. Mrs. Jeffers stands by, staring at us, says not a word, and leads us back down. Shaking her head, she disappears.

“Outside,” the old fellow went on, “we were accosted by children in Indian war bonnets brandishing plastic rifles.”

“This was in 1947,” he added.

An artist who had just won an award and was enjoying a nice midlife bump in her career was rumored to have died. The rumor did not, as they say, spread like wildfire, for she was not well known.

This minor incident affected her deeply and negatively, however. Her work suffered. She became obsessed with how her so-called friends reacted to this rumor of death. Did they cry? No one it seems had cried. But that was because, these so-called friends assured her, they did not believe she had died. There hadn’t been time to cry because the rumor was disproven so quickly. They’d been shocked, of course. Did they set right to summarizing her life and work with superlatives? Again, the answers provided were less than comforting. What did they really think of her anyway? If they couldn’t even tell her what they thought when they’d heard she died?

A so-called friend quoted from the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, this from a small red book he had recently discovered among what remained of his father’s things.

Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world .

The little red book had been a gift from this fellow’s mother to his father, both dead many years now, with no hope of coming back, and here she was, the artist, who had come back as it were and why wasn’t she more grateful about it or at least see the humor in it but she did not.

Penny had never liked the house and spent as much time as she could away from it. It fit her husband perfectly, however. He loved the open rooms, the little plunge beneath the palm trees, the shelves he had built for his many books, the long table where he and his friends played anagrams and poker. When he died, she accepted a position at a university a considerable distance away and rented out the house.

The new tenants adored it. They paid the rent promptly, planted flowers, and befriended the neighbors far more than Penny ever had. In front of the house they parked their three glorious vehicles — a Harley-Davidson, a Porsche, and a white Toyota Tundra.

They wanted to buy but offered a meager price. Penny’s price was fair, everyone said so, but the tenants mentioned the roof, the chipped clawfoot tub, the ailing mahogany tree that would have to be taken down, the foundation. There was frequent mention of the foundation. As well they spoke of the risk they would be taking — the possibility of hurricanes and dengue fever, the continuing poor economy. But they adored the house. This was where they wanted to be.

Penny found them irritating in any number of ways — they were ostentatious, full of self-regard, and cheap. They also did not read. But she knew herself well enough to know that they irritated her because they had found happiness in a simple place where she had not.

A few weeks before their lease was up, they offered to meet her price, but she refused them.

After canceling the insurance, she returned to the vacated house. The rooms were immaculate. Even the glass in the windows sparkled. She went from room to room with a clump of sweet and smoldering sage. She tried to think in the language of blessing. Then, with the assistance of a few gallons of accelerant, she set all that had been the structure on fire.