Lisey's Story Read online

  "I wouldn't've." She took the little notebook, which was limp with its owner's sweat. "Eight hundred and forty-six! That many!" And she knew the publications running along the wall weren't the sort she herself might read and have in the house, ones like O and Good Housekeeping and Ms., but rather Little Sewanee Review and Glimmer Train and Open City and things with incomprehensible names like Piskya.

  "Quite a few more than that," Amanda said, and cocked a thumb at the piles of books and journals. When Lisey really looked at them, she saw that her sister was right. Many more than eight hundred and forty-some. Had to be. "Almost three thousand in all, and where you'll put them or who'd want them I'm sure I can't say. No, eight hundred and forty-six is just the number that have pictures of you."

  This was so awkwardly stated that Lisey at first didn't understand it. When she did, she was delighted. The idea that there might be such an unexpected photo-resource--such a hidden record of her time with Scott--had never crossed her mind. But when she thought about it, it made perfect sense. They had been married over twenty-five years at the time of his death, and Scott had been an inveterate, restless traveler during those years, reading, lecturing, crisscrossing the country with hardly a pause when he was between books, visiting as many as ninety campuses a year and never losing a beat in his seemingly endless stream of short stories. And on most of those rambles she was with him. In how many motels had she taken the little Swedish steamer to one of his suits while the TV muttered talk-show psalms on her side of the room and on his the portable typewriter clacked (early in the marriage) or the laptop clicked quietly (late) as he sat looking down at it with a comma of hair falling on his brow?

  Manda was looking at her sourly, clearly not liking her reaction so far. "The ones that are circled--over six hundred of them--are ones where you've been treated discourteously in the photo caption."

  "Is that so?" Lisey was mystified.

  "I'll show you." Amanda studied the notebook, went over to the slumbering, wall-length stack, consulted again, and selected two items. One was an expensive-looking hardcover biannual from the University of Kentucky at Bowling Green. The other, a digest-sized magazine that looked like a student effort, was called Push-Pelt: one of those names designed by English majors to be charming and mean absolutely nothing.

  "Open them, open them!" Amanda commanded, and as she shoved them into her hands, Lisey smelled the wild and acrid bouquet of her sister's sweat. "The pages are marked with little scrids of paper, see?"

  Scrids. Their mother's word for scraps. Lisey opened the biannual first, turning to the marked page. The picture of her and Scott in that one was very good, very smoothly printed. Scott was approaching a podium while she stood behind him, clapping. The audience stood below, also clapping. The picture of them in Push-Pelt was nowhere near as smooth; the dots in the dot-matrix looked as big as the points of pencils with mooshed leads and there were hunks of wood floating in the pulp paper, but she looked at it and felt like crying. Scott was entering some dark cellarful of noise. There was a big old Scott grin on his face that said oh yeah, this be the place. She was a step or two behind him, her own smile visible in the back-kick of what must have been a mighty flash. She could even make out the blouse she was wearing, that blue Anne Klein with the funny single red stripe down the left side. What she had on below was lost in shadow, and she couldn't remember this particular evening at all, but she knew it had been jeans. When she went out late, she always put on a pair of faded jeans. The caption read: Living Legend Scott Landon (Accompanied By Gal Pal) Makes An Appearance At The University Of Vermont Stalag 17 Club Last Month. Landon Stayed Until Last Call, Reading, Dancing, Partying. Man Knows How To Get Down.

  Yes. Man had known how to get down. She could testify.

  She looked at all the other periodicals, was suddenly overwhelmed by the riches she might find in them, and realized Amanda had hurt her after all, had gored her a wound that might bleed a long time. Was he the only one who had known about the dark places? The dirty dark ones where you were so alone and wretchedly voiceless? Maybe she didn't know all that he had, but she knew enough. Certainly she knew he had been haunted, and would never look into a mirror--any reflective surface, if he could help it--after the sun went down. And she had loved him in spite of all that. Because the man had known how to get down.

  But no more. Now the man was down. The man had passed on, as the saying was; her life had moved on to a new phase, a solo phase, and it was too late to turn back now.

  The phrase gave her a shudder and made her think of things

  (the purple, the thing with the piebald side)

  best not thought of, and so she turned her mind away from them.

  "I'm glad you found these pictures," she told Amanda warmly. "You're a pretty good big sister, you know it?"

  And, as Lisey had hoped (but not really dared expect), Manda was startled right out of her haughty, skittish little dance. She looked uncertainly at Lisey, seeming to hunt for insincerity and finding none. Little by little, she relaxed into a biddable, easier-to-cope-with Amanda. She took back the notebook and looked at it with a frown, as if not entirely sure where it had come from. Lisey thought, considering the obsessive nature of the numbers, that this might be a big step in a good direction.

  Then Manda nodded as people do when they recall something that should not have been lost to mind in the first place. "In the ones not circled, you're at least named--Lisa Landon, an actual person. Last of all, but hardly least--considering what we've always called you, that's almost a pun, isn't it?--you'll see that a few of the numbers have squares around them. Those are pictures of you alone!" She gave Lisey an impressive, almost forbidding look. "You'll want to have a look at them."

  "I'm sure." Trying to sound thrilled out of her underpants when she was unable to think why she'd have any slightest interest in pictures of herself alone during those all-too-brief years when she'd had a man--a good man, a non-Incunk who knew how to strap it on--with whom to share her days and nights. She raised her eyes to the untidy heaps and foothills of periodicals, which came in every size and shape, imagining what it would be like to go through them stack by stack and one by one, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the memory nook (where else), hunting out those images of her and Scott. And in the ones that had made Amanda so angry she would always find herself walking a little behind him, looking up at him. If others were applauding, she would be applauding, too. Her face would be smooth, giving away little, showing nothing but polite attention. Her face said He does not bore me. Her face said He does not exalt me. Her face said I do not set myself on fire for him, nor he for me (the lie, the lie, the lie). Her face said Everything the same.

  Amanda hated these pictures. She looked and saw her sister playing salt for the sirloin, setting for the stone. She saw her sister sometimes identified as Mrs. Landon, sometimes as Mrs. Scott Landon, and sometimes--oh, this was bitter--not identified at all. Demoted all the way to Gal Pal. To Amanda it must seem like a kind of murder.

  "Mandy-oh?"

  Amanda looked at her. The light was cruel, and Lisey remembered with a real and total sense of shock that Manda would be sixty in the fall. Sixty! In that moment Lisey found herself thinking about the thing that had haunted her husband on so many sleepless nights--the thing the Woodbodys of the world would never know about, not if she had her way. Something with an endless mottled side, something seen best by cancer patients looking into tumblers from which all the painkiller had been emptied; there will be no more until morning.

  It's very close, honey. I can't see it, but I hear it taking its meal.

  Shut up, Scott, I don't know what you're talking about.

  "Lisey?" Amanda asked. "Did you say something?"

  "Just muttering under my breath." She tried to smile.

  "Were you talking to Scott?"

  Lisey gave up trying to smile. "Yes, I guess I was. Sometimes I still do. Crazy, huh?"

  "I don't think so. Not if it works. I think crazy is wh
at doesn't work. And I ought to know. I've had some experience. Right?"

  "Manda--"

  But Amanda had turned to look at the heaps of journals and annuals and student magazines. When she returned her gaze to Lisey, she was smiling uncertainly. "Did I do right, Lisey? I only wanted to do my part . . ."

  Lisey took one of Amanda's hands and squeezed it lightly. "You did. What do you say we get out of here? I'll flip you for the first shower."

  4

  I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot--so hot--and you gave me ice.

  Scott's voice.

  Lisey opened her eyes, thinking she had drifted away from some daytime task or moment and had had a brief but amazingly detailed dream in which Scott was dead and she was engaged in the Herculean job of cleaning out his writing stables. With them open she immediately understood that Scott indeed was dead; she was asleep in her own bed after delivering Manda home, and this was her dream.

  She seemed to be floating in moonlight. She could smell exotic flowers. A fine-grained summer wind combed her hair back from her temples, the kind of wind that blows long after midnight in some secret place far from home. Yet it was home, had to be home, because ahead of her was the barn which housed Scott's writing suite, object of so much Incunk interest. And now, thanks to Amanda, she knew it held all those pictures of her and her late husband. All that buried treasure, that emotional loot.

  It might be better not to look at those pictures, the wind whispered in her ears.

  Oh, of that she had no doubt. But she would look. Was helpless not to, now that she knew they were there.

  She was delighted to see she was floating on a vast, moon-gilded piece of cloth with the words PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR printed across it again and again; the corners had been knotted like hankies. She was charmed by the whimsy of it; it was like floating on a cloud.

  Scott. She tried to say his name aloud and could not. The dream wouldn't let her. The driveway leading to the barn was gone, she saw. So was the yard between it and the house. Where they had been was a vast field of purple flowers, dreaming in haunted moonlight. Scott, I loved you, I saved you, I

  5

  Then she was awake and could hear herself in the dark, saying it over and over like a mantra: "I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice."

  She lay there a long time, remembering a hot August day in Nashville and thinking--not for the first time--that being single after being double so long was strange shite, indeed. She would have thought two years was enough time for the strangeness to rub off, but it wasn't; time apparently did nothing but blunt grief's sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced. Because everything was not the same. Not outside, not inside, not for her. Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

  II. Lisey and The Madman (Darkness Loves Him)

  1

  The next morning Lisey sat tailor-fashion on the floor of Scott's memory nook, looking across at the heaps and stacks and piles of magazines, alumni reports, English Department bulletins, and University "journals" that ran along the study's south wall. It had occurred to her that maybe looking would be enough to dispel the stealthy hold all those as-yet-unseen pictures had taken on her imagination. Now that she was actually here, she knew that had been a vain hope. Nor would she need Manda's limp little notebook with all the numbers in it. That was lying discarded on the floor nearby, and Lisey put it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't like the look of it, the treasured artifact of a not-quite-right mind.

  She once again measured that long stack of books and magazines against the south wall, a dusty booksnake four feet high and easily thirty feet long. If not for Amanda, she probably would have packed every last one of them away in liquor-store boxes without ever looking at them or wondering what Scott meant by keeping so many of them.

  My mind just doesn't run that way, she told herself. I'm really not much of a thinker at all.

  Maybe not, but you always remembered like a champ.

  That was Scott at his most teasing, charming, and hard to resist, but the truth was she'd been better at forgetting. As had he, and both of them had had their reasons. And yet, as if to prove his point, she heard a ghostly snatch of conversation. One speaker--Scott--was familiar. The other voice had a little southern glide to it. A pretentious little southern glide, maybe.

  --Tony here will be writing it up for the [thingummy, rum-tum-tummy, whatever]. Would you like to see a copy, Mr. Landon?

  --Hmmmm? Sure, you bet!

  Muttering voices all around them. Scott barely hearing the thing about Tony writing it up, he'd had what was almost a politician's knack for turning himself outward to those who'd come to see him when he was in public, Scott was listening to the voices of the swelling crowd and already thinking about finding the plug-in point, that pleasurable moment when the electricity flowed from him to them and then back to him again doubled or even tripled, he loved the current but Lisey was convinced he had loved that instant of plugging in even more. Still, he'd taken time to respond.

  --You can send photos, campus newspaper articles or reviews, departmental write-ups, anything like that. Please. I like to see everything. The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road, Castle Rock, Maine. Lisey knows the zip. I always forget.

  Nothing else about her, just Lisey knows the zip. How Manda would have howled to hear it! But she had wanted to be forgotten on those trips, both there and not there. She liked to watch.

  Like the fellow in the porno movie? Scott had asked her once, and she'd returned the thin moon-smile that told him he was treading near the edge. If you say so, dear, she had replied.

  He always introduced her when they arrived and again here and there, to other people, when it became necessary, but it rarely did. Outside of their own fields, academics were oddly lacking in curiosity. Most of them were just delighted to have the author of The Coaster's Daughter (National Book Award) and Relics (the Pulitzer) among them. Also, there had been a period of about ten years when Scott had somehow gotten larger than life--to others, and sometimes to himself. (Not to Lisey; she was the one who had to fetch him a fresh roll of toilet paper if he ran out while he was on the john.) Nobody exactly charged the stage when he stood there with the microphone in his hand, but even Lisey felt the connection he made with his audience. Those volts. It was hardwired, and it had little to do with his work as a writer. Maybe nothing. It had to do with the Scottness of him, somehow. That sounded crazy, but it was true. And it never seemed to change him much, or hurt him, at least until--

  Her eyes stopped moving, fixed on a hardcover spine and gold leaf letters reading U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review.

  1988, the year of the rockabilly novel. The one he'd never written.

  1988, the year of the madman.

  --Tony here will be writing it up

  "No," Lisey said. "Wrong. He didn't say Tony, he said--"

  --Toneh

  Yes, that was right, he said Toneh, he said

  --Toneh heah well be rahtin it up

  "--writin it up for the U-Tenn '88 Year in Review," Lisey said. "He said . . ."

  --Ah could Express Mail it

  Only she was damned if the little Tennessee Williams wannabe hadn't almost said Spress Mail it. That was the voice, all right, that was the southern-fried chickenshit. Dashmore? Dashman? The man had dashed, all right, had dashed like a smucking track-star, but that wasn't it. It had been--

  "Dashmiel!" Lisey murmured to the empty rooms, and clenched her fists. She stared at the book with the gold-stamped spine as if it might disappear the second she took her eyes away. "Little prig-southerner's name was Dashmiel, and HE RAN LIKE A RABBIT!"

  Scott would have turned down the offer of Express Mail or Federal Express; believed such things to be a needless expense. Abo
ut correspondence there was never any hurry--when it came floating downstream, he plucked it out. When it came to reviews of his novels he had been a lot less Come Back To De Raft, Huck Honey and a lot more What Makes Scotty Run, but for write-ups following public appearances, regular mail did him just fine. Since The Study had its own address, Lisey realized she would have been very unlikely to see these things when they came in. And once they were here . . . well, these airy, well-lighted rooms had been Scott's creative playground, not hers, a mostly benign one-boy clubhouse where he'd written his stories and listened to his music as loud as he wanted in the soundproofed area he called My Padded Cell. There'd never been a KEEP OUT sign on the door, she'd been up here lots of times when he was alive and Scott was always glad to see her, but it had taken Amanda to see what was in the belly of the booksnake sleeping against the south wall. Quick-to-offense Amanda, suspicious Amanda, OCD Amanda who had somehow become convinced that her house would burn flat if she didn't load the kitchen stove with exactly three maple chunks at a time, no more or less. Amanda whose unalterable habit was to turn around three times on her stoop if she had to go back into the house for something she'd forgotten. Look at stuff like that (or listen to her counting strokes as she brushed her teeth) and you could easily write Manda off as just another gonzo-bonkie old maid, somebody write that lady a prescription for Zoloft or Prozac. But without Manda, does little Lisey ever realize there are hundreds of pictures of her dead husband up here, just waiting for her to look at them? Hundreds of memories waiting to be called forth? And most of them surely more pleasant than the memory of Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit coward . . .

  "Stop it," she murmured. "Just stop it now. Lisa Debusher Landon, you open your hand and let that go."

  But she was apparently not ready to do that, because she got up, crossed the room, and knelt before the books. Her right hand floated out ahead of her like a magician's trick and grasped the volume marked U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary. The madman's hair had been so blond it was almost white. He had been a graduate student madman, spouting what was not quite gibberish. A day after the shooting--when Scott's condition was upgraded from critical to fair--she had asked Scott if the madman grad student had had it strapped on, and Scott had whispered that he didn't know if a crazy person could strap anything on. Strapping it on was a heroic act, an act of will, and crazy people didn't have much in the way of will . . . or did she think otherwise?