Mourning Wood Read online

  Other Books by Daniel Paisner

  Fiction

  Obit

  Nonfiction

  The Ball: Mark McGwire’s 70th Home Run Ball and the Marketing of the American Dream

  Horizontal Hold: The Making and Breaking of a Network Television Pilot

  Heartlands: An American Odyssey

  The Imperfect Mirror: Inside Stories of Television Newswomen

  Collaborations

  The Price of Their Blood: Profiles in Spirit (with Jesse Brown)

  Say What you Mean and Mean What you Say! (with Judge Glenda Hatchett)

  Winners Make It Happen (with Leonard H. Lavin)

  Last Man Down (with Richard Picciotto)

  A Dozen Ways to Sunday (with Montel Williams)

  The Hill (with Ed Hommer)

  I’m Not Done Yet! (with Edward I. Koch)

  You Have to Stand for Something or You’ll Fall for Anything (with Star Jones)

  Pataki: Where I Come From (with George Pataki)

  Book (with Whoopi Goldberg)

  True Beauty (with Emme)

  Mountain, Get Out of My Way (with Montel Williams)

  One Man Tango (with Anthony Quinn)

  Citizen Koch: An Autobiography (with Edward I. Koch)

  Exposing Myself (with Geraldo Rivera)

  First Father, First Daughter (with Maureen Reagan)

  Theo and Me: Growing Up Okay (with Malcolm-Jamal Warner)

  America is My Neighborhood (with Willard Scott)

  MOURNING WOOD

  a novel

  All rights reserved © 2018 by Daniel Paisner

  Cover photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published by Doppelgang Press

  Print ISBN: 9781625361455

  Ebook ISBN: 9781625361448

  For Hana

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

  The winds that will be howling at all hours,

  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

  It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

  —William Wordsworth

  Contents

  Fall

  1.Here

  2.Wood on Down

  3.Alone

  4.Not Thinking

  Winter

  5.Up-Gathered Now Like Sleeping Flowers

  6.What It’s Like

  Spring

  7.Antennae

  8.Roaming Charges

  9.You Say You Want an Evolution

  Fall

  “Am I not a man? And, is not a man stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything . . . the full catastrophe!”

  —Zorba the Greek

  Here

  Here, now, the snaking two-lane road along Maine’s rocky coast seems covered with a custom length of satiny black tarpaulin. The sky has turned quickly from not-too-bad to an ominous dark gray (there’s even some fiery orange to it), and Terence Wood guesses the rest of his day has turned with it. Guy on the radio confirms this. Rog’ at Large tells Wood and whomever else is listening to hunker down, lock it up right and tight, there’s a full-blown, full-throttle storm warning in effect for the entire area. Get set, get warm, get toasty. (This is Rog’ talking.) Get rockin’ ready.

  Wood—a hulking, tortured, celebrated presence, he fills the car like a deployed airbag—doesn’t register the warnings. He hears them, but he’s not listening. He’s driving, in no particular hurry, to one of his cabins to decompress, read a couple scripts, bathe himself in Wild Turkey, avoid the phone, and it doesn’t occur to him to cut his destination short until the storm does its business. It’s not a prospect. There’s another cabin in New Hampshire; he’d have to double back a couple hours, but it’s inland, in the mountains, and he’s already called ahead and had a caretaker lay in supplies at the house in Maine, so there’s no sense even thinking about it.

  He’s just driving, moving forward, not really thinking beyond basic traffic safety, but even that doesn’t merit all that much attention. Passing scenery, passing thoughts barely enter one segment of his tortured brain before exiting another, as in a breezeway.

  Already, the rain has started to fall sure and constant, like a good shower at a better hotel, the temperature dropped to where the water hugs the asphalt like a protective coating. Oh, it is nowhere near cold enough for ice, but the road is suddenly slick, and Terence Wood, even with his shift-on-the-fly four-wheel drive, even with the way he handles a car, is suddenly unsure. (There was that Le Mans movie he made, couple years back, did his own driving; nobody cared enough to go see it, but there it was.) He coasts through a still-fresh puddle, chassis-deep, and he instinctively stomps on his wet brakes to check that they are still working. They are, far as he can tell, but he pulls his black Pathfinder onto an insignificant tumor of road, which juts over the swelling sea like a diving board, and he stops there a moment, waiting for the hard rain to pass, making sure.

  Car phone. The machine rings like a malfunction. He has to remind himself to answer it. Oh, yeah, this damn thing. Right. The radio mutes when Wood picks up the handset. His agent, out in Los Angeles. Something about a meeting at Paramount. The life of Vince Lombardi, the dead football coach. They want him for Lombardi, Wood learns through weather interference.

  “What?” the agent mock-asks when Wood wonders about the part, “they want you for Bart Starr?” Then, in a swallowed aside, to no one else: “He’s sixty years old, my famous friend, he thinks he can still play fucking Bart Starr.” (Actually, he’s sixty-five.)

  Last week, they wanted Wood for Bear Bryant in something else. Something else, but the same thing.

  “Looks sweet, Terry,” his agent is saying. He hates it when they call him Terry. He hates it when they remind him he has a car phone. He hates it when they use words like sweet, or tasty, to talk about a deal. It’s like fruit, the movies, to these people.

  “Send it to me,” Terence Wood says back, flat.

  “You’ve had it two weeks.”

  “Send it to me again.” Wood returns the handset to its sleek cradle and stares out across the swelling sea below. The phone makes an otherworldly beep to sound the end of the transmission, and Wood is still not enough used to the noise to keep from wondering about it. First he thinks there’s another call, then he remembers. Oh. Right. That. There are all these noises, so many noises, there’s no chance he could keep them all straight. He inventories his noises: the sick groan of his Hewlett Packard plain paper fax machine, the cartoon trombone of his Ungo Box car alarm, the steady bleat of the Polar heart rate monitor he wears strapped to his chest, even driving, even though his doctors say his heart’s fine. There. What else? Oh. Right. There’s this annoying chime thing going on—sometimes, when it wants—with his multi-
function Timex Ironman watch. And, always, there is the blather of the Mmes. Wood—Elaine, Anita, Petra—the women to whom he was once (and, in the case of his Pet, technically still) married. He puts the three women at the top of his list.

  The phone, on speaker now, retreats to static. He’s somehow knocked it loose trying to figure the thing back to its cradle, and the slip fills the car with a discordant hiss. Wood is not sure he minds the noise. It focuses him, but he doesn’t move to right it, not right away. Right away what he does is nothing. Right away he just sits there, the rain patting down on the tinted glass of his windshield, now fogged with his breath and the weather, and he lets the static from his phone duel it out with the sky.

  Looks sweet.

  He lapses from dead ahead into all over the place, then he sets himself straight again. There. This is where Terence Wood is right now, what he’s doing, and he’s determined that the white noise remind him of his place. Perfect, he thinks. If his life were a movie, and it might as well be a fucking movie, the static and the rain would swirl into some ponderous New Age background music, and Wood’s squinted reflection in the rectangle of rearview mirror would dissolve into a kind of static of its own. Instead what it does is glare back at him—empty, uncertain, tired—so he rewrites the scene in his head to conform with the one in the car. Here’s the way it is, adjusted: Terence Wood’s entire world, his very being, is inside this car, entombed in the cab of a Japanese import, and he is being kept here by everything going on outside. To him, now, the cellular phone is conspiring to keep him here, and it rings as both signal and testimony of his confinement.

  He leans away from the mirror, pinch-rubs at the bridge of his nose, considers. Log of shit, he thinks. Spend enough time with these people and you start to think like them. And so, unlike them, he refashions his screen from the rectangle of tinted windshield—movie theater dimensions, just about—and this time he gets the big picture version. This time his point of view is through the glass across the horizon like he is at a drive-in, the world stretched out before him, for his amusement, just. The sky is darker than it was a few beats before, and Wood can’t figure whether what’s approaching will be like something out of a disaster movie, or nothing at all. The disaster movie part he gets from the weather and from too many years-ago breakfasts with Irwin Allen. (Remember, there was that story of the Hyatt Hotel fire, but it never got out of development.) The nothing at all he gets from everything else.

  Wood cranks the defroster, adjusts the phone. He returns the machine to its cradle in time for it to ring again. It’s like the rest of the world has been waiting for Terence Wood to plug himself back in, and now that he has, it wants him. He lets his own air leak from his pressed lips—an exaggerated actor’s sigh. He also lets the phone ring, and ring, and ring, and with each pass, he tells himself he is getting more and more used to this new sound. It rings seven times, eight. It doesn’t matter who it is. It’s always someone.

  Here, in what passes for the Record-Transcript newsroom, what passes for Axel Pimletz manages four column inches about a retired Brockton man—the self-celebrated “Prince of Mini Golf”—whose widow claimed he had played miniature golf courses in all fifty states, on four continents, and even once in Switzerland in the long shadows of the Matterhorn. Pimletz takes her at her word that there even is a miniature golf course in Switzerland in the long shadows of the Matterhorn. He’s got nothing else to go on.

  Earlier, he filed another four column inches in memory of a Fenway Park usher, somebody Gundersen, whose seating career dated to the Red Sox’s glory, and who once, moonlighting, fetched a couple hot dogs for a bulging Babe Ruth during the slugger’s last regular season game at Braves Field. The Babe, the story grows, never reimbursed the usher for his eats, although he did tip his cap in gratitude, which was something. Gundersen, who came to be known as Old Gundy as he himself took on in years at Fenway, wound up with a once-in-a-lifetime story for his twenty cents, which was something again. Pimletz gets to the twenty cents because hot dogs, he’s told, were ten cents at Braves Field in 1935. He does the math himself. The research he leaves alone.

  Pimletz, writing, rests his elbows on the arms of his ancient oak swivel chair, his wrists snapping up and down at his keyboard with each new thought. Sometimes, the entire chair snaps up and down with the same motion, the wheeze on the recline signaling his progress. When he gets going good, like he did late yesterday, reworking a wire service job on the Illinois woman who started the country’s first temporary secretary agency (Steno Gals), Pimletz’s fingers can flit across these keys like he is at a piano and knows how to play it, like the music is a part of him. Mostly, though, he just gets going, and he needs the empty clatter of his keys and the slow wheeze from his chair to remind himself he has something to do.

  This last has become a theme for the recently fortied Pimletz—or, at least, a continuing concern. He needs something to do. He needs to feel like something, someone. He wants to matter. In fact, he wants to matter so much he tricks himself into believing he does. Sometimes, with no one on the other end, he’ll even sandwich the phone between his ear and shoulder, for appearances. He is so hungry for some urgent business even the charade of urgent business will do.

  The afternoon edition of the Boston Record-Transcript, still warm, lays halved at the corner of Pimletz’s messed desk, a front-page editorial on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for 2000 who is sort of waffling on the abortion issue riding the paper’s curl. Next to it, in full view, a boxed photo of a young mother jogging along the Charles, her infant daughter in push, helmeted in a canopied runner’s stroller, underneath the headline A BREAK IN THE ACTION—which may or may not have had anything to do with the mother-helmeted-daughter-jogging picture at the time it was committed to newsprint, which, in turn, may or may not have had anything to do with George Jr.’s waffling.

  Lately, Pimletz has been thinking in song titles, and, as long he’s on it, he wonders if maybe there’s a way to make some money from the habit. “Waffling on Abortion.” He’s useless when it comes to lyrics (and most else), but he imagines there’s a market for the kind of satire he spots in the paper every day and sets to music. Well, it’s not music exactly, it’s just song titles, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right? He’s not even sure it’s satire, but still. That guy on PBS, from Washington, stands by the piano in his bow-tie and sings his made-up political songs? It can’t be he writes all of them himself. It can’t be he’s so overflowing with creativity that the stuff just bubbles forth. Probably he could use a good song title to get him started. “Waffling on Abortion.” First it’s this; then it’s that; then it’s something else. Waffle, waffle, waffle. Dee diddle dee dum. Or, something. “Tax This.” “Put Away the Lox Spread, ’Cause Daddy’s Got a Job.” He’s got a few of them filed away.

  Pimletz means to take today’s paper with him on his way to the Men’s, but he forgets about it until he is nearly there, and, by this time, it is too late. By this time, he has already troubled the out-in-the-hall receptionist from her second application of shocking pink nail polish for the also-shocking Record-Transcript newsstand newspaperweight, the length and heft of which suggest one of those supermarket check-out line dividers, which has here been cutely and blatantly enlisted as a bathroom key chain, and he does not now wish to reinforce his mission by doubling back to collect any reading matter, still warm or no. Last thing he needs is to advertise his intentions, the time on his hands.

  Instead, Pimletz moves forward, fits the key into the Men’s lock, leans into the door, and heads for the middle stall, where he fists a couple coarse toilet paper squares and wipes down the chipped black seat. Another last thing he needs: a wet seat misted with whoknowswhat?

  Sitting, his mind someplace else (or, more accurately, on nothing much at all), Pimletz finally notices his pants resting sadly in a small, clear puddle. Actually, it is just a section of pant doing this sad resting, and the garment is bunched now around Pimletz’s ankles to where h
e cannot even guess at the corresponding, in-use location of the puddled piece, but the effect on his already sagged spirits is as if both trouser legs (and crotch! and seat!) had been soaked through. His impulse is to lift himself from the puddle, but this does not happen easily. His weight, squatting, is mostly thrown down and also forward, his legs held together at the bunched-up ankles, and Pimletz has to kind of tilt back onto his ass cheeks and pivot in a tight ball, kicking out his held-together legs to dry tile. For a moment, frozen in this awkward motion, he gets a picture of himself, and he is reduced by what he must look like. Worse, he soon notices the couple coarse toilet paper squares he fisted in preparation for this seating were the last to be had, at least in this stall, and he curses himself for this too-predictable turn. “Fuck you, Axel,” he says, out loud, his voice reverberating off the also-chipped green tile walls, to where the small, empty room fairly echoes with his despair.

  And so, in desperation, Pimletz considers his next move. First, he fits his gaze into the narrow opening by the stall’s door hinges. He wants to make certain there is no one else about to see what he is about to do. What he is about to do is slide his pants back up around his waist, unbelted, and scamper to the adjacent stall to hunt for some toilet paper. This is his plan, and after he determines the Men’s is otherwise empty, he pulls his pants up slowly, stops to notice the darkened wet spot which now alights at the back of his left thigh, and pinches his belt ends loosely together with his right hand. He peers out the stall door and makes for the safety of the one next to it, to his left, facing out. He does his scampering in a strange, low crouch, fearful of soiling his Looms, and hopeful the Groucho-like gait will somehow leave his ass cheeks sufficiently apart, or together, to keep his clothes sufficiently clean. This last is an afterthought to the scrambling Pimletz, but he puts it foremost. He tries to adjust himself accordingly, but he is not practiced enough at this, nor quick enough in a crisis, to know which way accordingly might be.