The Peace Process Read online

  You’d think the fates would lighten up for a while, but it doesn’t work that way. I got the call that I more or less expected—about my sister. She had taken another fall and this time she didn’t get up. Would you believe they still hadn’t laid down a lousy patch of carpeting on her side of the bed?

  Holly left behind a letter—beautifully composed, with the calligraphy and everything—saying she wanted to be cremated so as not to be a burden to anyone. The girls and I discussed a memorial, but somehow it never came together. Steve moved down to Lauderdale. I drop him a line once in a while.

  I’m down here now in my studio on Ludlow Street. The heat is erratic and I still feel some of the pain that the new shoulders were supposed to eliminate. But I’ve got plenty of pills and blankets. Everything I need in the way of food or drugstore supplies is just a phone call away. I’ve got Social Security and, unbelievably, a couple of bucks still come in from the Koreans. So I’m doing fine. Now and then I think back to my glory days—when my first absurdist play was having its sold-out run. I felt like king of the world. My picture was in the Voice. The head of Loehmann’s Department Store stopped me on the street and said, “Why, oh why, can’t we get tickets to your play?” (All the while playfully pounding me on the chest.) Nor was I exactly the invisible man in Vegas. Eighty-five people depended on me to make a living. I got comped at half the restaurants on the Strip.

  Maybe I didn’t have it all, but I had plenty. Am I afraid of dying? Not with the life I led.

  And then there’s my poor sister. I’ll grant that she did have Steve and the house and the sixty-year marriage, and somehow they’d come up with a summer place in Maine. From the look of it, I don’t think they had a bad day together. One of the girls, the one with the MS who I was crazy about, is interning at Bellevue Psychiatric. And the quiet one just got her PhD in economics at Stanford. So Holly did have all of that. But when I think of her capabilities—the letters alone, with the calligraphy and the sentence structure, the whole package—when I reflect on how far she could have gone, and the life she settled for. The wasted potential. To me it’s not just a sad story, it’s an American tragedy.

  The Storyteller

  Slowly it came back to him. Downing was his name. Or was it Dowling? Yes, that was it. Dowling. Alan Dowling. Retired English teacher … lived in Iowa, though no connection to the famed writing workshop. (How he wished.) Widower. Awful the way it happened. So sudden. A glorious trip to Lake Como and then a fall. They’d returned from a restaurant in the Bellagio, and down some steps she went. Bloody Louboutins, something along that line, shoes (footwear?) being her one indulgence. Out went the lights for Louise, and it was as if he’d imagined her, imagined the marriage. And a good one it had been too. Twenty years. Never raised her voice. Shamed, when he raised his. Five hundred steps to go back and forth to a bloody restaurant. (In the interest of honesty, the food was awfully good. Memorable, actually, worth the five hundred steps if it had gone another way.)

  He’d gotten by, muddled through for a year or two; a few screams in the night as he reached for her—Louise, where are you? … then, after an appropriate mourning period (what was appropriate?) looked up an old girlfriend in Oregon, who was unrecognizable at more than two hundred pounds. She’d posted a misleading photograph on the web, one in which her slender, full-breasted figure appeared to have held up nicely. They’d once gone to the edge of advanced S&M, then broken it off. He’d arrived with the thought of picking it up, brought along some clamps, a boxed set, actually. But no way he was going to attach clamps—not at two fifty. Back he went to Iowa to look after the knee. Went well for a bit, then had to have it replaced. Got “the best man” to do it. (And weren’t they all “the best man”?) Some sweet dreams and Dowling never came off the table.

  Before the surgery, a woman in the waiting room had told him: “Take care they don’t drop you.”

  Her husband had been dropped a few times after they’d punched in a pair of hips. Well, they didn’t drop Dowling, he’d say that for them. Who knows. Might have been better off if they had.

  And now this.

  He’d thought about the Next Step, of course. Gates of heaven, torments of hell. Preferred, of course, something in between, a compromise of sorts. Perhaps a favorite restaurant. A kind of hangout. Wouldn’t that have been a treat. Lots of good friends who’d shuffled off before he did. A reunion of sorts. But wherever he’d actually landed (been sent?) seemed remarkably similar to the place he’d left. He’d been given a comfortable room in what might have been a town house, quite spacious with some history attached to it … great tapestries, brocaded rugs and some Renaissance-style paintings. He was seated at a large desk, a great oaken thing, which he guessed had been hand-carved. Though he had little appetite, a roasted chicken had been set before him on a platter, along with a joint of mutton and a flask of reddish liquid, perhaps punch. Through the window, he could see a building or two floating and a bus that seemed to be traveling upward on a vertical course. Strange—but other than that, all seemed peaceful and might have been a thoroughfare in humdrum Des Moines.

  He was soon joined by a Mr. Hump, the name unfortunate though fitting. The small and cheerful man did indeed have a hump on his back. And wasn’t there a less unlovely designation for such a condition, malformation of the spine, some such term? (Not much improvement there. Might as well stay with the familiar.) Mr. Hump seated himself beside Dowling and welcomed him to wherever they were—Dowling couldn’t make out the name. Something Square. Was it Grosvenor? … Or Grover Square? Asked him how the “trip,” so to speak, had been.

  “Bit bumpy,” said Dowling.

  “I should imagine,” said Mr. Hump. “Now, let me get straight to the point. That’s the way we do things here at Grosvenor Point.” (Or was it Governor’s Point?)

  “We have no books or stories here. Not a one. No plays, either, for that matter, although I suppose we could struggle along without any of your dramatis personae.”

  He said this last with a sudden foul look. And then he reflected for a moment.

  “Perhaps a stray line of poetry here and there …”

  “Poetry’s not my strong suit,” said Dowling. “As you put it, a stray line or two, that about sums it up. Goes right through me like a sieve. In fear of poets too, for that matter. Afraid they’re going to quiz me on layers of meaning in The Waste Land.”

  “I don’t care,” said Mr. Hump, coming to the very tip of rudeness. “You’re a storyteller, am I correct?”

  “Not quite. I have taught literature to community college students …”

  “Same thing,” said Mr. Hump, wrong, and once again, a bit more brusque than seemed to be required. “We would like, sir, to have some.”

  “Stories?” Dowling asked.

  “Books, stories, a play if you insist. Whatever you can supply. We have nothing. I’m sure this will be second nature to you.”

  “I’m sure,” said Dowling, who was sure, at least for the moment. If he didn’t know stories, who on Earth did.

  Hump reached into a giant briefcase and pulled out a dozen or so legal pads, several quilled pens, and a bottle of ink.

  “Just scribble them down as you think of them. On second thought, a single good one should do the trick. Take as long as you like.”

  And then he added, ominously, “So long as you don’t overdo it.”

  He grabbed his fat neck and pretended to throttle himself, blowing out his cheeks and letting a long tongue protrude. He wasn’t much of an actor, but he did get his point across.

  After composing himself, he took a little bow, as if expecting applause for his performance.

  “I’ll look in on you now and then,” he said, cheerful once again, “to see how you’re coming along. Twenty-three hours should do it, don’t you feel?”

  “Of course,” said Dowling, who felt the wisest course was to agree.

 
He summoned up the courage to ask a question.

  “May I ask if you’ve ever had books and stories?”

  “No,” said Mr. Hump bitterly.

  “Then how have you gotten along without them?”

  “Don’t ever address me in that manner,” said Hump.

  What manner was that? Dowling wondered. Had he been rude? If so, he hadn’t been aware of it. He was not a rude individual. Clearly he would have to deal with new rules of etiquette.

  His host pointed to the flask that contained a red liquid.

  “Today’s drink is Campari. If it’s not to your liking, I’m sure we can find another.”

  “Campari’s fine,” said Dowling, who was a beer drinker, but sensed it would be best not to rock the boat.

  “Good, good,” said Hump.

  He surprised Dowling by pinching his cheek.

  “I knew you’d be an agreeable fellow.”

  With that, Hump bowed, or more accurately curtsied, and made his exit.

  “This is certainly an odd situation,” said Dowling, thinking the obvious to himself. “Although I suppose I ought to be grateful to be in any situation at all.”

  He sliced off a piece of roast chicken, which was savory but disappointingly tough and difficult to chew. Reminded him that he owed his dentist a considerable sum for his bridgework.

  Then he thought: Might as well get started.

  Books, stories. It should have been, it was, right up his alley. He’d spent a good part of his life reading, generally at midnight until three in the morning. No special scheme to it. One book kicked him into another. A visitor, whose shelves were neatly organized, had once looked at Dowling’s and said: “Who on God’s Earth lives here?” Cookbooks side by side with Bleak House. (At least seven copies of it. Never could find Bleak House. When he couldn’t put his hands on the Dickens classic, he’d send off for another.)

  Dowling took a sip of Campari. Something wrong here. Didn’t Campari go with something? Campari and soda? Or bitters? Did anyone drink straight Campari? Evidently these people did.

  Time to get down to business. When it came to books, all roads, at least for Dowling, led back to Catcher. Catcher in the Rye, though he no longer saw a need to use the full title. Reading it had been an epiphanic experience for Dowling—as it had been for so many others. It almost turned him into a writer. Almost. (Though he did give it one try.) For the most part, he remained on the sidelines, a lover of literature. Let others beat their heads against a wall. He’d pick up their leavings. Or the occasional triumphant result. That was good enough for Dowling. Tony, he recalled. Tony Dowling. He was Tony Dowling, and he was—had been—fifty-eight.

  It had been many years since he’d read the novel. Read Catcher. Quite frankly, he didn’t want to read it again and risk being disappointed. There was Holden Caulfield, of course, and his attitude. His youthful cynicism. He’d run away from prep school, hadn’t he, and spent quite a bit of time roaming around the city (Manhattan?) encountering a hooker at one point, although she hadn’t been precisely classified as such. And there was a (ten-year-old?) sister who was precious to Holden and may have redeemed him, or something along those lines. He wasn’t quite sure what she had redeemed him from—alienation, something in that area. Nonetheless, all of it was terribly satisfying; it seemed the perfect choice to get started. But when he thought about it, there wasn’t much of a “story” to it, much of a conventional story, with zigs and zags, structured of course, Acts One, Two, and Three, and surprises. He had the feeling that the Hump people, whoever they were, wanted more than a summary of the plot. And what exactly was the plot? Wasn’t it all texture and nuance? Character. He could see the Hump group narrowing their eyes.

  “Tell us a bloody story,” he could hear one of them saying, at a gathering of some sort.

  “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Holden Caulfield, who had an unusual way of looking at the world.”

  And where would he go from there? Wouldn’t do. Annoy the hell out of them is what it would accomplish. Best to set aside Catcher for the moment and turn to another novel, Huckleberry Finn. The Twain novel had been seminal to him too … and obviously not just to Dowling. Of great importance to Ernest Hemingway, for example, who’d felt that all American literature sprang from the book. Although how Bellow’s Herzog, for example, sprang from Huckleberry Finn was beyond Dowling. Still, this was Hemingway. Best not to muck around with the theory. Dowling recalled adoring Huck and “Nigger Jim,” enjoyed them as a team. (And didn’t they, incidentally, give rise to the Hollywood “buddy” movies such as Stir Crazy, which had teamed up a black and a white actor and had proven to be enormously successful at the box office? Why hadn’t someone looked into that?) No question that Huck Finn was the genuine article, but just try teaching it at a seminar. Dowling did, just once, at a community college, and almost got his head handed to him. Most of those attending were minority students, and though Dowling tried to put the use of the word “nigger” in historical perspective, they just weren’t buying it. Didn’t care about historical perspective. You just don’t throw around the word “nigger” every five sentences. Maybe one “nigger,” and even then … A few punches were thrown, with Dowling crying out “For God’s sakes, can we please put the word ‘nigger’ in historical perspective?” From then on, he dropped it from the syllabus. Why go to all that trouble when there were so many other books to choose from. Gulliver’s Travels, as an example. If that gem didn’t do the trick, what would?

  How he’d loved the book when he was a boy, and the movie as well, though film hadn’t come up in his discussion with Mr. Hump. (Otherwise, he’d throw All About Eve at him—Double Indemnity—don’t get him started.) Dowling recalled that Gulliver was a young man of average height who found himself in a land populated by tiny people (Lilliputians?) each one no bigger than a thimble. At one point, they overpower him and tie him to the ground. Dowling could see the illustration clearly, in some children’s book. Gulliver’s long hair and look of puzzlement. (Or was that Lancelot?) No doubt Gulliver escaped (there were other adventures in the book—something to do with horse-like creatures), but Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century summary kept nagging at him: Big and little, and there you have it.

  He decided to turn to Middlemarch. There was a novel for you. How he’d loved it. Well, not quite loved it, but certainly admired it. A great battleship of a novel is what it was. All the intertwining plot lines, although he couldn’t quite recall what they were. Someone was a doctor and made an awfully good case for why certain individuals turned to medicine. (Dowling would bring this up at faculty wine and cheese get-togethers.) And that was only two pages of a monster of a novel. And of course, there was Casaubon. What a character he was. Gloomy fellow. Disappointed in love, wasn’t he? His wife going off with some other fellow? Vronsky? Was that his name? Or perhaps he was the one in Anna Karenina. But oh, that Casaubon. No one quite like him unless you wanted to count Anna Karenina’s husband (Karenin?)—also stiff and gloomy and disappointed in love.

  As long as he was doing the Russians, perhaps Crime and Punishment would be the safest bet—everyone loved a good crime story. But it had been so long since he’d read the novel, and wasn’t it insufferably gloomy? He had a feeling the Hump people had enough gloom in their lives, so he decided to skip the nineteenth-century Russian classics. Had he stayed with them, he would eventually have had to deal with the serfs. How could he possibly keep the Hump people enthralled by a recounting of serf grievances? Serf issues. Hiss and throw things at him and storm out is what they’d do. Serf grievances, indeed, when all we’ve asked for is a bloody good yarn.

  All of which led him, somewhat circuitously, to a great favorite, Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. Big novels. That’s what had taken him there. And the Trollope novel certainly was big. Paid by the word, wasn’t he? Or was that Dickens? No matter. What a story Trollope had served up. Melmotte, the shady
financier, wading into English society as a mysterious outsider, rising to the top of the social heap and eventually brought low by an embezzlement scheme involving railroad issues. Something along that line. He was Jewish too. Important to note that. Could make a neat comparison to Bernie Madoff. But did they know who Bernie Madoff was? The disgraced schemer lingering away in prison and waking up in the morning with that ridiculous two-hundred-year sentence staring him in the face. If that didn’t get you depressed, what would? And you needed the Madoff comparison if you were going to hold the attention of the Hump people. Or at least Dowling did.

  Perhaps there was another Trollope. There certainly were enough of them. The man wrote fifty novels, for God’s sakes (and felt, absurdly, that he hadn’t written “enough.”) Yet Dowling, with all that pressure on him—couldn’t put his finger on another favorite. The Barsetshire novels. Barchester novels. Amazing how he remembered even that much. It had been so many years. A trilogy, isn’t that what they were, enormously pleasurable, although how Trollope managed to squeeze fun out of all that church intrigue was beyond Dowling. … And let’s be serious. Let’s say that Dowling was on to something. The church intrigue. Bishops. Could he really be expected to get his arm around it … around Trollope, and “package” him for the Hump crowd? The Hump committee, or whatever the group was that awaited his judgment. Not very likely. Not with the time allotted. Or even if he had lots of time, to be truthful. Best to drop Trollope for the moment.

  His preoccupation with Trollope and George Eliot wasn’t a complete loss. At least it brought him ’round to the Brits, who had always been his favorites. Masters of satire is what they were. Mention “British” and “satire” and Dowling was on the floor, holding his sides to keep from bursting with laughter. Dowling had so many favorites, but inevitably, Decline and Fall shouldered the others aside. He’d read the book twelve times—all right, make that three—and it never ceased to leave him thoroughly delighted. And heartbroken, of course. Always a little heartbreak in Waugh, concealed, but there, skimming along beneath the surface. Some preferred Scoop to Decline, and that was their privilege. But in his heart of hearts, Dowling felt they were wrong, wrong, wrong.