My second crying fit came three or four days after the funeral. That sense of being in a dream persisted — I walked, I talked, I answered the phone, I worked on my book, which had been about eighty percent complete when Jo died — but all the time there was this clear sense of disconnection, a feeling that everything was going on at a distance from the real me, that I was more or less phoning it in.
Denise Breedlove, Pete’s mother, called and asked if I wouldn’t like her to bring a couple of her friends over one day the following week and give the big old Edwardian pile I now lived in alone
— rolling around in it like the last pea in a restaurant-sized can — a good stem-to-stern cleaning.
They would do it, she said, for a hundred dollars split even among the three of them, and mostly because it wasn’t good for me to go on without it. There had to be a scrubbing after a death, she said, even if the death didn’t happen in the house itself.
I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours’ work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasn’t, I told her, it would be done, anyway.
‘Mr. Noonan, that’s far too much,’ she said.
‘Maybe and maybe not, but it’s what I’m paying,’ I said. ‘Will you do it?’
She said she would, of course she would.
Perhaps predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didn’t want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding anything that would embarrass them or me: a pair of Johanna’s silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (‘We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael,’ she said to me once, ‘have you noticed?’), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unflushed toilet. In truth, I can’t tell you any one thing I was looking for; that sense of operating
in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic killer had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. Piece of fish for supper, she had said.
And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice.
Near the end of my ‘pre-cleaning,’ I looked under our bed and saw an open paperback on Jo’s side. She hadn’t been dead long, but few household lands are so dusty as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johanna’s face and hands in her coffin — Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get dusty inside a coffin?
Surely not, but —
I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept creeping back, like Tolstoy’s white bear.
Johanna and I had both been English majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury Town cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwright with the reptile’s face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantic’s heart. So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The Moon and Sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.)
She had been using a playing card from some defunct deck as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had been, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. ‘A hundred years from now,’ she had said, ‘the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham.’ This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didn’t laugh. I fell in love.
The playing card marked pages 102 and 103 — Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maugham’s version of Paul Gauguin. The narrator tries to buck Stroeve up. My dear fellow, don’t be unhappy. She’ll come back . . .
‘Easy for you to say,’ I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me.
I turned the page and read this: Strickland’s injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland.
Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve found himself on the floor.
‘You funny little man,’ said Strickland.
It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten — how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life — I understood it wasn’t a mistake that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead.
My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadn’t been there, I would have fallen to the floor.
We weep from our eyes, it’s all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every pore of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain;
in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing ‘Blessed Assurance’ in his high, sweet tenor voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadn’t really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not: it insisted she was dead.
You funny little man, said Strickland.
I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when they’re unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are — logic like Dalí clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs.
I put the playing-card bookmark back between pages 102 and 103 — a turn of the index finger away from You funny little man, said Strickland now and forever — and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it.
Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the box spring and caressed her cheek like a feather.
Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane.
‘Give me that,’ she hissed. ‘It’s my dust-catcher.’ She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face — a shroud of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed.
I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadn’t been asleep long — the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me.