Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

The cleric walked over to the coffin and sprinkled it and prayed out loud. I started thinking of the man out back, stoking the fire like a fry cook in clogs, stirring the coals in a black kitchen, sweating worse than we were and wiping his face on his shoulder, banging his poker on the furnace door to slam the hot ashes from the tip. What burial customs.

It was over. The cleric flung his arms into the sign of the cross, a novice’s flourish of sleeves, and blessed us and said, “Amen.” The coffin was rolled out of the room through a rear door and we all went out to our cars.

“You ready?” I asked Gladys.

Her tears had dried. She looked at me. “This short time or all day?”

Before I could answer Yardley was beside me asking, “You coming along? We’re going for a drink. The day’s a dead loss — no sense going to work.”

“I’ll be there in a little while,” I said, and seeing Hing leaving, smiled and waved him off. Hing’s face was tight; he was unused to the lecturing at Christian services and might have expected the brass band, the busloads of relatives, the banners and pennants and cherry bombs that saw a Chinese corpse to the grave.

“Short time,” said Gladys. “Where I am dropping?”

I did not reply. Yardley and Frogget faced the sky behind me. I turned to look. Smoke had started from the chimney, a black puff and ripples of stringy heat, then a gray column unimpeded by any breeze shooting straight up and enlarging, becoming the steamy air that hung over the island. Despair is simple: fear without a voice, a sinking and a screamless fright. We watched in silence, all of us. Coony ground his cigarette out and gaped; then, conscious that we were all watching the smoke, we looked away.

“Who’s paying for this?” Yardley asked.

“I am,” I said, and felt sad. But when I got into the little car with Gladys and started away, throwing the shift into second gear, I felt only relief, a springy lightness of acquittal that was like youth. I was allowed all my secrets again, and could keep them if I watched my step. It was like being proven stupid and then, miraculously, made wise.

FOR AS LONG as I could remember I had wanted to be rich, and famous if possible, and to live to the age of ninety-five; to eat huge meals and sleep late out of sheer sluttishness in a big soft bed; to take up an expensive but not strenuous sport, golf or deep-sea fishing in a fedora with a muscular and knowledgeable crew; to gamble with conviction instead of bitterness and haste; to have a pair of girl friends who wanted me for my money — the security was appealing: why would they ever leave me? All this and a town house, an island villa, a light plane, a fancy car, a humidor full of fat fragrant cigars — you name it. I guessed it would come to me late: fifty-three is a convenient age for a tycoon; the middle-aged man turning cautious and wolflike knows the score, and if he has been around a bit he can take the gaff. It did not occur to me that it might never happen.

Being poor was the promise of success; the anticipation of fortune, a fine conscious postponement, made the romance, for to happen best it would have to come all at once, as a surprise, with the great thud a bag of gold makes when it’s plopped on a table, or with the tumbling unexpectedness of thick doubloons spilling from the seams of an old wall you’re tearing apart for the price of the used wood. One rather fanciful idea I’d had of success was that somehow through a fortuitous mix-up I would be mistaken for a person who resembled me and rewarded with a knighthood or a country estate; it was as good as admitting I did not deserve it, but that it was far-fetched made my receptive heart anticipate it as a possibility. It might, I thought, be a telephone call on a gray morning when, fearing bad news, I would hear a confident educated voice at the other end say, “Brace yourself, Mr. Flowers, I’ve got some wonderful news—”

Wonderful news in another fantasy was a letter. I composed many versions of these and recited them to myself walking to the 8-A bus out of Moulmein Green in the morning, or killing time in a hotel lobby when a girl was finishing a stunt upstairs, or dealing out the porno decks, or standing on the Esplanade and staring at the ships in the harbor.

One started like this:

Dear Mr. Flowers ,

It gives me great pleasure to be writing to you today, and I know my news will please you as much…

Another was more direct:

Dear Flowers ,

I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, and I’m very happy to inform you of my decision concerning your future…

Another:

Dear Jack ,

I am asking my lawyer to read you this letter after my death. You have been an excellent and loyal friend, the very best one could hope for. I have noted you in my will for a substantial portion of my estate as a token thanks for your good humor, charity, and humanity. You will never again have to think of…

Another:

Dear Sir ,

Every year one person is singled out by our Foundation to be the recipient of a large cash disbursement. You will see from the enclosed form that no strings whatever are attached…

Another:

Dear Mr. Flowers ,

The Academy has entrusted to me the joyful task of informing you of your election. This carries with it as you know the annual stipend of …

There were more; I composed as many as thirty in an afternoon, though usually I stuck to one and phrased it to perfection, working on it and reciting every altered declaration of the glorious news. The last was long and rambling; it was only incidentally about money, and it began, My darling…

No man of fifty-three wants to look any more ridiculous than his uncertain age has already made him, and I am well aware that in disclosing this fantastic game I played with myself, the sentences above, which prior to a few moments ago had never been written anywhere but in my head, much less typed under the embossed letterheads I imagined and pushed through the mail slot of my semidetached house on Moulmein Green — I am well aware that in putting those eager (“Brace yourself”) openings in black and white I seem to be practicing satire or self-mockery. The difficulty is that unchallenged, squatting like trepanned demons in the padded privacy of an idle mind, one’s lunatic thoughts seem tame and reasonable, while spoken aloud in broad daylight to a stranger or written before one’s own eyes they are the extravagant ravings of a crackpot. You know what I want? I said to Leigh, and told him, and was made a fool by his look of shock; I should have kept my mouth shut, but how was I to know that he was not the stranger who would say, “I’ve got some good news for you, Flowers.” He might have thought I was mad. Madness is not believing quietly that you’re Napoleon; it is demonstrating it, slipping your hand inside your jacket and striking a military pose. He might have thought I was crude. But the beginner’s utterance is always wrong: I used to stand in Singapore doorways and hiss, “Hey bud” at passers-by.

Crude I may have been, but mad never; and I would like to emphasize my sanity by stating that even though I dreamed of getting one of those letters ( It gives me great pleasure …) I could not understand how I would ever receive one, for I imagined thousands, paragraph by glorious paragraph, but I never mentally signed them, and none, not even the one beginning My darling , bore a signature. Who was supposed to be writing me those letters? I hadn’t the faintest idea.

The letters were fantasy, but the impulse was real: a visceral longing for success, comfort, renown, the gift that could be handled, tangible grace. That momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide, Sir or President or His Highness —everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural — this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as Your Radiance. I had a litany which began Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John , and so forth. And why stop at king? Saint Jack! It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?