Lisey's Story Read online

  Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back--he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song--blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He's being a good sport while the photographer circles. Damn good sport. He's flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who's going to write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the right by their standin host, an English Department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses. Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn't like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it's easy, because most men do like him), and it has given her something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy, profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it's no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer kind of thing. But the barometer wasn't low in Maine when she got out of bed this morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already, with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the grass between the house and Scott's study. Not a cloud in the sky, what old Dandy Dave Debusher would have called "a real ham-n-egger of a day." Yet the instant her feet touched the oak boards of the bedroom floor and her thoughts turned to the trip to Nashville--leave for the Portland Jetport at eight, fly out on Delta at nine-forty--her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She had greeted these sensations with surprised dismay, because she ordinarily liked to travel, especially with Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book open, she with hers. Sometimes he'd read her a bit of his and sometimes she'd vice him a little versa. Sometimes she'd feel him and look up and find his eyes. His solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too. It was like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she and her sisters had been young, the Krazy Kups and the Wild Mouse. Scott never minded the turbulent interludes, either. She remembered one particularly mad approach into Denver--strong winds, thunderheads, little prop-job commuter plane from Death's Head Airlines all over the smucking sky--and how she'd seen him actually pogo-ing in his seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that scared Scott were the smooth downbound ones he sometimes took in the middle of the night. Once in a while he talked--lucidly; smiling, even--about the things you could see in the screen of a dead TV set. Or a shot-glass, if you held it tilted just the right way. It scared her badly to hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy, and because she sort of knew what he meant, even if she didn't want to.

  So it isn't low barometer that's bothering her and it certainly hadn't been the prospect of getting on one more airplane. But in the bathroom, reaching for the light over the sink, something she had done without incident or accident day in and day out for the entire eight years they'd lived on Sugar Top Hill--which came to approximately three thousand days, less time spent on the road--the back of her hand whacked the waterglass with their toothbrushes in it and sent it tumbling to the tiles where it shattered into approximately three thousand stupid pieces.

  "Shit fire, save the smuckin matches!" she cried, frightened and irritated to find herself so . . . for she did not believe in omens, not Lisey Landon the writer's wife, not little Lisey Debusher from the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon Falls, either. Omens were for the shanty Irish.

  Scott, who had just come back into the bedroom with two cups of coffee and a plate of buttered toast, stopped dead. "Whadja break, babyluv?"

  "Nothing that came out of the dog's ass," Lisey said savagely, and was then sort of astonished. That was one of Granny Debusher's sayings, and Granny D certainly had believed in omens, but that old colleen had been on the cooling board when Lisey was barely four. Was it possible Lisey could even remember her? It seemed so, for as she stood there, looking down at the shards of toothglass, the actual articulation of that omen came to her, came in Granny D's tobacco-broken voice . . . and returns now, as she stands watching her husband be a good sport in his lightest-weight summer sportcoat (which he'll soon be sweating through under the arms nevertheless).

  --Broken glass in the morning, broken hearts at night.

  That was Granny D's scripture, all right, remembered by at least one little girl, stored up before the day Granny D pitched over dying in the chickenyard with a snarl in her throat, an apron filled with Blue Bird feed tied around her waist, and a sack of Beechnut scrap slid up her sleeve.

  So.

  Not the heat, the trip, or that fellow Dashmiel, who only ended up doing the meet-and-greet because the head of the English Department is in the hospital following an emergency gall-bladder removal the day before. It's a broken . . . smucking . . . toothglass combined with the saying of a long-dead Irish granny. And the joke of it is (as Scott will later point out), that is just enough to put her on edge. Just enough to get her at least semi-strapped.

  Sometimes, he will tell her not long hence, speaking from a hospital bed (ah, but he could so easily have been on a cooling board himself, all his wakeful, thoughtful nights over), speaking in his new whispering, effortful voice, sometimes just enough is just enough. As the saying is.

  And she will know exactly what he's talking about.

  4

  Roger Dashmiel has his share of headaches today, Lisey knows that, though it doesn't make her like him any better. If there was ever an actual script for the ceremony, Professor Hegstrom (he of the emergency gall-bladder attack) was too post-op muddled to tell Dashmiel or anyone else what or where it is. Dashmiel has consequently been left with little more than a time of day and a cast of characters featuring a writer to whom he has taken an instant dislike. When the little party of dignitaries left Inman Hall for the short but exceedingly warm walk to the site of the forthcoming Shipman Library, Dashmiel told Scott they'd have to more or less play it by ear. Scott had shrugged good-naturedly. He was absolutely comfortable with that. For Scott Landon, ear was a way of life.

  "Ah'll introduce you," said the man Lisey would in later years come to think of as the southern-fried chickenshit. This as they walked toward the baked and shimmering plot of land where the new library would stand (the word is pronounced LAH-bree in Dashmiel-ese). The photographer in charge of immortalizing all this danced restlessly back and forth, snapping and snapping, busy as a gnat. Lisey could see a rectangle of fresh brown earth not far ahead, about nine by five, she judged, and trucked in that morning, by the just-starting-to-fade look of it. No one had thought to put up an awning, and already the surface of the fresh dirt had acquired a grayish glaze.

  "Somebody better do it," Scott said.

  He spoke cheerfully, but Dashmiel had frowned as if wounded by some undeserved canard. Then, with a meaty sigh, he'd pressed on. "Applause follows introduction--"

  "As day follows night," Scott murmured.

  "--and yew'll say a woid or tieu," Dashmiel finished. Beyond the baked wasteland awaiting the library, a freshly paved parking lot shimmered in the sunlight, all smooth tar and staring yellow lines. Lisey saw fantastic ripples of nonexistent water on its far side.

  "It will be my pleasure," Scott said.

  The unvarying good nature of his responses seemed to worry Dashmiel. "Ah hope you won't want to say tieu much at the groun'breakin," he told Scott as they approached the roped-off area. This had been kept clear, but there was a crowd big enough to stretch almost to the parking lot waiting beyond it. An even larger one had trailed Dashmiel and the Landons from Inman Hall. Soon the two would merge, and Lisey--who ordinarily didn't mind crowds any more than she minded turbul
ence at twenty thousand feet--didn't like this, either. It occurred to her that so many people on a day this hot might suck all the air out of the air. Stupid idea, but--

  "It's mighty hot, even fo' Nashville in August, wouldn't you say so, Toneh?"

  Tony Eddington nodded obligingly but said nothing. His only comment so far had been to identify the tirelessly dancing photographer as Stefan Queensland of the Nashville American--also of U-Tenn Nashville, class of '85. "Hope y'all will help him out if y'can," Tony Eddington had said to Scott as they began their walk over here.

  "Yew'll finish yoah remarks," Dashmiel said, "and there'll be anothuh round of applause. Then, Mistuh Landon--"

  "Scott."

  Dashmiel had flashed a rictus grin, there for just a moment. "Then, Scott, yew'll go on and toin that all impawtant foist shovelful of oith." Toin? Foist? Oith? Lisey mused, and it came to her that Dashmiel was very likely saying turn that all-important first shovelful of earth in his only semi-believable Louisiana drawl.

  "All that sounds fine to me," Scott replied, and that was all he had time for, because they had arrived.

  5

  Perhaps it's a holdover from the broken toothglass--that omenish feeling--but the plot of trucked-in dirt looks like a grave to Lisey: XL size, as if for a giant. The two crowds collapse into one around it and create that breathless suck-oven feel at the center. A campus security guard now stands at each corner of the ornamental velvet-rope barrier, beneath which Dashmiel, Scott, and "Toneh" Eddington have ducked. Queensland, the photographer, dances relentlessly with his big Nikon held up in front of his face. Paging Weegee, Lisey thinks, and realizes she envies him. He is so free, flitting gnatlike in the heat; he is twenty-five and all his shit still works. Dashmiel, however, is looking at him with growing impatience which Queensland affects not to see until he has exactly the shot he wants. Lisey has an idea it's the one of Scott alone, his foot on the silly silver spade, his hair blowing back in the breeze. In any case, Weegee Junior at last lowers his big camera and steps back to the edge of the crowd. And it's while following Queensland's progress with her somewhat wistful regard that Lisey first sees the madman. He has the look, one local reporter will later write, "of John Lennon in the last days of his romance with heroin--hollow, watchful eyes at odd and disquieting contrast to his otherwise childishly wistful face."

  At the moment, Lisey notes little more than the guy's tumbled blond hair. She has little interest in people-watching today. She just wants this to be over so she can find a bathroom in the English Department over there across the parking lot and pull her rebellious underwear out of the crack of her ass. She has to make water, too, but right now that's pretty much secondary.

  "Ladies and gentlemen!" Dashmiel says in a carrying voice. "It is mah distinct pleasure to introduce Mr. Scott Landon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winnin Relics and the National Book Award-winnin The Coster's Daughter. He's come all the way from Maine with his lovely wife Lisa to inaugurate construction--that's right, it's finally happ'nin--on our very own Shipman LAH-bree. Scott Landon, folks, let's hear y'all give him a good Nashveel welcome!"

  The crowd applauds at once, con brio. The lovely wife joins in, patting her palms together, looking at Dashmiel and thinking, He won the NBA for The Coaster's Daughter. That's Coaster, not Coster. And I think you know it. I think you smucked it up on purpose. Why don't you like him, you petty man?

  Then she happens to glance beyond him and this time she really does notice Gerd Allen Cole, just standing there with all that fabulous blond hair tumbled down to his eyebrows and the sleeves of a white shirt far too big for him rolled up to his substandard biceps. The tail of his shirt is out and dangles almost to the whitened knees of his jeans. On his feet are engineer boots with side-buckles. To Lisey they look dreadfully hot. Instead of applauding, Blondie has clasped his hands rather prissily and there's a spooky-sweet smile on his lips, which are moving slightly, as if in silent prayer. His eyes are fixed on Scott and they never waver. Lisey pegs Blondie at once. There are guys--they are almost always guys--she thinks of as Scott's Deep Space Cowboys. Deep Space Cowboys have a lot to say. They want to grab Scott by the arm and tell him they understand the secret messages in his books; they understand that the books are really guides to God, Satan, or possibly the Gnostic Gospels. Deep Space Cowboys might be on about Scientology or numerology or (in one case) The Cosmic Lies of Brigham Young. Sometimes they want to talk about other worlds. Two years ago a Deep Space Cowboy hitchhiked all the way from Texas to Maine in order to talk to Scott about what he called leavings. These were most commonly found, he said, on uninhabited islands in the southern hemisphere. He knew they were what Scott had been writing about in Relics. He showed Scott the underlined words that proved it. The guy made Lisey very nervous--there was a certain wall-eyed look of absence about him--but Scott talked to him, gave him a beer, discussed the Easter Island monoliths with him for a bit, took a couple of his pamphlets, signed the kid a fresh copy of Relics, and sent him on his way, happy. Happy? Dancing on the smucking atmosphere. When Scott's got it strapped on tight, he's amazing. No other word will do.

  The thought of actual violence--that Blondie means to pull a Mark David Chapman on her husband--does not occur to Lisey. My mind doesn't run that way, she might have said. I just didn't like the way his lips were moving.

  Scott acknowledges the applause--and a few raucous rebel yells--with the Scott Landon grin that has appeared on millions of book-jackets, all the time resting one foot on the shoulder of the silly shovel while the blade sinks slowly into the imported earth. He lets the applause run for ten or fifteen seconds, guided by his intuition (and his intuition is rarely wrong), then waves it off. And it goes. At once. Foom. Pretty cool, in a slightly scary way.

  When he speaks, his voice seems nowhere near as loud as Dashmiel's, but Lisey knows that even with no mike or battery-powered bullhorn (the lack of either here this afternoon is probably someone's oversight), it will carry all the way to the back of the crowd. And the crowd is straining to hear every word. A Famous Man has come among them. A Thinker and a Writer. He will now scatter pearls of wisdom.

  Pearls before swine, Lisey thinks. Sweaty swine, at that. But didn't her father tell her once that pigs don't sweat?

  Across from her, Blondie carefully pushes his tumbled hair back from his fine white brow. His hands are as white as his forehead and Lisey thinks, There's one piggy who keeps to the house a lot. A stay-at-home swine, and why not? He's got all sorts of strange ideas to catch up on.

  She shifts from one foot to the other, and the silk of her underwear all but squeaks in the crack of her ass. Oh, maddening! She forgets Blondie again in trying to calculate if she might not . . . while Scott's making his remarks . . . very surreptitiously, mind you . . .

  Good Ma speaks up. Dour. Three words. Brooking no argument. No, Lisey. Wait.

  "Ain't gonna sermonize, me," Scott says, and she recognizes the patois of Gully Foyle, the main character of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. His favorite novel. "Too hot for sermons."

  "Beam us up, Scotty!" someone in the fifth or sixth row on the parking-lot side of the crowd yells exuberantly. The crowd laughs and cheers.

  "Can't do it, brother," Scott says. "Transporters are broken and we're all out of lithium crystals."

  The crowd, being new to the riposte as well as the sally (Lisey has heard both at least fifty times), roars its approval and applauds. Across the way Blondie smiles thinly, sweatlessly, and grips his delicate left wrist with his long-fingered right hand. Scott takes his foot off the spade, not as if he's grown impatient with it but as if he has--for the moment, at least--found another use for it. And it seems he has. She watches, not without fascination, for this is Scott at his best, just winging it.

  "It's nineteen-eighty-eight and the world has grown dark," he says. He slips the ceremonial spade's short wooden handle easily through his loosely curled fist. The scoop winks sun in Lisey's eyes once, then is mostly hidden by the sleeve of Scott
's lightweight jacket. With the scoop and blade hidden, he uses the slim wooden handle as a pointer, ticking off trouble and tragedy in the air in front of him.

  "In March, Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on conspiracy charges--it's the wonderful world of Iran-Contra, where guns rule politics and money rules the world.

  "On Gibraltar, members of Britain's Special Air Service kill three unarmed IRA members. Maybe they should change the SAS motto from 'Who dares, wins' to 'Shoot first, ask questions later.'"

  There's a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Roger Dashmiel looks hot and put out with this unexpected current-events lesson, but Tony Eddington is finally taking notes.

  "Or make it ours. In July we goof and shoot down an Iranian airliner with two hundred and ninety civilians on board. Sixty-six of them are children.

  "The AIDS epidemic kills thousands, sickens . . . well, we don't know, do we? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

  "The world grows dark. Mr. Yeats's blood-tide is at the flood. It rises. It rises."

  He looks down at nil but graying earth, and Lisey is suddenly terrified that he's seeing it, the thing with the endless patchy piebald side, that he is going to go off, perhaps even come to the break she knows he is afraid of (in truth she's as afraid of it as he is). Before her heart can do more than begin to speed up, he raises his head, grins like a kid at a county fair, and shoots the handle of the spade through his fist to the halfway point. It's a showy poolshark move, and the folks at the front of the crowd go oooh. But Scott's not done. Holding the spade out before him, he rotates the handle nimbly between his fingers, accelerating it into an unlikely spin. It's as dazzling as a baton-twirler's maneuver--because of the silver scoop swinging in the sun--and sweetly unexpected. She's been married to him since 1979 and had no idea he had such a sublimely cool move in his repertoire. (How many years does it take, she'll wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a Wake up! Wake up! sunflash across the heat-dazed, sweat-sticky surface of the crowd. Lisey's husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy honey, I'm hip huckster's grin on his face. He has bummed them out; now he will try to sell them a throatful of dubious get-well medicine, the stuff with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he's like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is . . . and God bless the language pool where we all go down to drink, as Scott himself would no doubt add (and has).