The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Read online

“Maybe because of that historical coincidence, my brother was nuts on the subject of Elvis, touched, obsessed. Lance owned—conscientiously collected—every one of Elvis’s recordings up to the moment of his death—Lance’s death, I mean—and I inherited that collection and added to it and kept it complete up to the moment of his death—Elvis’s death. Three hundred and eighty-six vinyl discs, eventually—every album, every single, even the corny Christmas and gospel stuff, all the way back to ‘It’s All Right Mama.’ Lance bequeathed half of it to me, and I kept collecting. As of two days before Elvis’s death, I had everything, and all the covers—the covers are what the collectors want, even more than the records themselves—I had everything.

  “But here’s a terrible fact: As of the day Elvis died—I didn’t have any of it, not any more.

  “Less than twenty-four hours before Elvis was found dead on his bathroom floor, I had boxed up and shipped off my dead brother’s collection of every one of his recordings. Like a faithful priest, I had kept up the collection until what none of us knew would be the very last one—‘Way On Down,’ which peaked at thirty-one on the Billboard charts—I thought, ‘This man has become pitiful, and my brother’s dead, and I need money for college’—that’s how I phrased it, though of course my folks paid my way entirely, and I just wanted a little jingle in my pockets. I didn’t even need that. I had a few hundred. I’d just spent the summer working as a landscaper’s grunt, the most horrible summer of my life, and I didn’t want any kind of job, not even a part-time cafeteria job…Eleven boxes weighing forty-nine pounds. Took it to the PO, sent it certified and insured for four thousand U.S. dollars, the purchase price. The cashier’s check was already on the way to me from Alberta, Canada.

  “The next morning I turned on the news and learned of the death, the previous night, of Elvis Presley. It skewered my heart, Kev—can I call you Kev?”

  “Nobody calls me Kev.”

  “I want to.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “—and my mind snapped, my soul sickened, and I went to Memphis. It was either that, or kill the dog.”

  I’ve condensed the tale, and the time it took to tell this much of it. Twilight had filled the streets. A cold draft rolled in from the Hudson along 106th, stinking like the river. The pigeons and squirrels had retired for the night, and the rats too. A homeless man slept under newspapers and blankets on the only other bench, and a second man sat on the ground nearby with his back against a tree and his worldly belongings bundled beside him and his blanket wrapped around his shoulders, giving us the evil eye. It was clear we occupied his bed. But Mark had taken me by the nose. I was his prompter—and more, confessor—as he led me toward that part of the world labeled on the old charts “Here Be Monsters.”

  “What dog?”

  “My brother’s little bulldog—Sinbad. My folks took him in.”

  “Why on earth would you kill—”

  “It’s just an expression, Kev. —Hey, you know, my brother Lance described almost the same experience you did with the Jailhouse Rock film. He was in the third grade too. If your bio in the back of the Young Poets anthology is correct, you’re thirty-five, right? You guys would be almost exactly the same age.”

  “Should I feel a little bit uncomfortable that you’re talking like that? Sort of roping me into a family scenario?”

  “Sure, go ahead and feel uncomfortable. Feel free.” I laughed, and Mark said, “My brother had a theory about Elvis Presley and the murderous colonel—nobody buys this theory, but to me it makes a lot of sense. I think it can be proven. Proving it is my life’s work.”

  “The most important thing you do.”

  “Right.”

  “More important than your talent and your art.”

  “Correct.”

  “Exploring a theory about a marquee idol. And how will this theory be proven?”

  “Through the amassing of facts.”

  “And are you going to tell me what this theory is?”

  “Next time.”

  We’d stood up to exchange our parting gestures. The bench’s owner had arranged himself on the bench with his cup presented for alms. I went over to make a contribution and instead created a scene. The poor guy swore at me viciously, obscenely, with savage skill: I had just plunked two germy quarters into his fresh cup of coffee. Now what? Back then you really didn’t know—at any moment Manhattan could shank you, finish you off. Mark Ahearn appeared at my side and bailed me out with a five-dollar bill. We said good night.

  Mark and I took an early dinner together after each of the semester’s three remaining classes, and then we didn’t meet again in person until 1990. During this period of half a dozen years, the early years of my acquaintance with Mark, parallel to our friendly correspondence but quite independent of it, I found Marcus Ahearn’s verse becoming essential to me. I called him on the phone two or three times a year to get an update on his publications, to hear his kind voice, and to ask for poems. He was good enough to send me a few now and then, once the manuscript for an upcoming book. Also Mark sent me cassette tapes of himself singing songs of his own devising, unaccompanied, in a voice a lot like Elvis’s voice, with an echo, as if he’d recorded them—where? In a trash can? He published his first two books, won a couple of awards, remained single, and relocated frequently, filling lucrative visiting-professor posts of the kind available to top-tier literary figures nowadays at university writing programs who get the good ones in, wring a few words of wisdom out of them, and send them along before they start angling for something tenure-track. That was Mark, the itinerant professor, and it still is. As for Marcus Ahearn, the poet—much the same. He’d distinguished himself by traveling his own orbit, and his aesthetic territory didn’t crowd anyone else’s. Among readers of poetry, rarefied and meager as that audience may be, he’d become part of the stellar map. His writing was important.

  But it wasn’t the most important thing he did.

  Mark’s brother Lance, a twinless twin, had bequeathed him all the vinyl records of Elvis Presley, another twinless twin. Negligent of the deep personal authority of these gifts, Mark let them slip from his grasp—worse: sold them for money. In the ensuing guilty years, Mark’s obsession with Elvis flourished even more wildly than his brother’s and came to focus on one particular thread of his brother’s interest in the rock ’n’ roll King—the brother’s theory, or hypothesis, that the Elvis Presley found dead on his bathroom floor the afternoon of August 16, 1977, the Elvis Presley who had lived in the Graceland Mansion for nearly twenty years, was not Elvis Presley; that in the spring of 1957 Colonel Tom Parker arranged for the disappearance—the assassination, the willful murder—of the King and his replacement by a quisling Elvis, that is, by his lost twin brother Jesse Garon Presley, falsely believed to have been stillborn, “but living all along in Memphis,” Ahearn told me, “with his adopted mother, Sarah Jane Restell, the demon midwife who stole him the night of his birth.”

  “I don’t have legal-standard proof of every detail, no, but hang on to your hat,” he told me on the telephone one morning in a conversation that got unnecessarily distended by his enthusiasm, unnecessarily, I say, because he’d called me, in the first place, to tell me he was staying at a cabin only a few miles from my house, and to invite me over for breakfast—but he couldn’t pause his monolog ten minutes to let me drive over and lend him an actual ear—“because as of yesterday’s mail delivery, Kev, I’ve got dead solid proof that the brother and his adopted mother existed. I’ve got the documents right here on this kitchen table,” he said on the phone, and now I was hurrying through the messy, off-and-on Cape Cod winter like somebody out of Hitchcock: I would arrive to find him stretched out with his throat cut, and all the documents, the dead solid proof, vanished.

  I was living, then, in Wellfleet, where my wife Anne Hayes had inherited a rambling old wooden house built in 1795. Mark was house-sitting on Slocum Pond, a lonely neighborhood during the off-season, in a cabin that had probably been the
original pondside dwelling, early 1800s construction, very low ceilings, drafty and creaky, like Anne’s and mine, only smaller, and, thanks to surrounding leafless oaks, even sadder than ours. But Ahearn had sweetened the atmosphere of his house with brewing coffee.

  After six years, he looked the same. I think he wore the same tweed jacket. In the claustrophobic kitchen he put his hands on my shoulders and gazed at me at arm’s length, and said, “Where are my words?” I took that for a welcome. Mark was excited by his newly acquired documents, but first we had to walk the dog. While the evidence lay in open view on the kitchen table, Mark and I turned up our collars and tagged along with Sinbad the Second, a wizened pit bull who inquired with a scientific deliberateness all around the pond, stopping often to shiver but not to do his business. Contravening local ordinances, he traveled unleashed. “I’ll never put a leash on him,” Mark said. He lived here with this one companion, reading and writing. After a noticeable silence, he’d recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski’s skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark’s words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It’s plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see. Marcus Ahearn trafficks with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark called his process “psychic improvisation” and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee’s. “You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long,” he told me. I could see he needed to talk. He spoke of the power of the spiral currents of water, winds, and metaphysical energies that had sculpted the Cape’s curlicue tail, about ten miles from the tip of which we were situated at the moment, here at Slocum Pond among the green pines and malformed black oaks, adding—did Ahearn—that he’d revised his thinking as to reincarnation and now believed the concept to be solely metaphorical, “just another word game, even if the saints and Buddhas are playing it,” and who was I to argue about things like reincarnation? My own treatment of the matter went no farther than to pray it was a fiction, this single current addled existence of mine being vastly more than enough. For months I’d been getting the runaround about a new contract from my publisher, and I’d recently flubbed an interview at the University of Michigan, and my wife of seven years was driving, at that second, up Route 6 to an 11 a.m. appointment in Hyannis with a divorce attorney. From horizon to horizon the sky was stuffed with dark clouds—not just a metaphor, but also the scene over our actual heads, a mute, shrunken Cape Cod winter. “Well,” I said, “if the saints think reincarnation’s a game worth playing…” Mark said: “I mean, sure, something’s happening over and over, but what? Maybe it’s just the breath in and out of our lungs.” I pointed out we didn’t need a metaphor for breathing—“You just talked about it quite literally.” Mark laughed and draped his arm around my shoulders and asked me if I’d heard of a book called Timeshare with the King, and I said of course not, and the same for its authors, Ron and Opal Bright.

  I’ve looked at it since: In April 1958, two weeks following Elvis’s entry into the U.S. Army, an Arkansas farmer in his fresh-seeded field of sorghum watches a figure coming toward him over the rows—“stopped about ten yards distant, stood looking out toward the horizon—a lad in blue jeans, white teeshirt, motorcycle boots—then turns his gazing eyes on me, Ron Blaine Bright, who said instantly—You are the King!”

  Elvis the apparition said: “Ron, Your Aunt Grace in Kimbro, Texas, has gone on. She was strolling the gold streets of Paradise with me this morning. She sent me here to tell you.” Then turned and walked back across the fields—“and left real and solid boot-prints through the loam, till the path”—and out of sight.

  Arriving home, the farmer Bright found a telegram stuck in the screen door: Yes, Aunt Grace—gone on.

  The whole thing, remarkable as it was, went out of mind when his wife Opal came in from the orchard behind the house and said, “Ron, I just watched Elvis Presley walking around in the pear trees. And he talked to me just as usual as anything.” Ron said, “I saw him too!”—“Did he tell you your Aunt Grace went to her reward?” Opal asked, and Ron showed her the yellow paper from Western Union.

  “The thing is,” Ron Blaine Bright points out, “if Elvis was with Aunt Grace in Paradise and all, doesn’t that mean he’d gone on too? But how could Elvis be dead, if he was over there in Fort Hood with the U.S. Army?” A question neither he nor Opal confronted at the time.

  Later, at supper, Opal said, “Don’t look at me!” She put her napkin over her pretty face and said, “There’s something I didn’t want to say before. The King told me he’d take me to Paradise.”

  The very next evening, Ron Bright recalls, the poltergeist began its nightly visits, “moaning a little the way only the King could moan, rattling and clanking, especially in the kitchen, no real rough stuff, and no breakage.” A principal trick was to turn on the kitchen radio loudly and abruptly when an Elvis song was playing. Another was to fiddle with the family’s bottle of honey, which they often found in the mornings overturned and spilling its sweet contents on the pantry floor.

  The book, divided into neat halves, continues with the account of Opal Bright, who depicts herself as also dripping honey, “a twenty-year-old woman forty miles from town,” sozzling in her nightshift on the porch swing with her knee hiked, and she reveals almost immediately, in paragraph one, that her liaison with the King “began with his call like a touch,” improved to distant glimpses from the bedroom window, then became a tickling, sickly, hopeless “thing that took a good, hard hold.” She depicts herself as burning and barefoot, wandering through a southern night suffocatingly aromatic with new blossoms, many of them vaguely visible as she passed, their daylight colors washed by the moon and stars to a uniform eggplant, or aubergine. In the cool mown grass, or on the wide cowhide seat of a Model D John Deere tractor, or in other “tender and intimate places,” Opal Bright and the King formed their bond, and pretty soon, thanks to Ron Bright’s generous spirit, “me and the King, and Ron,” his wife reports, “had a timeshare going in the bedroom.

  “The King said he’d take me to Paradise. He didn’t lie.”

  The timeshare in Paradise lasted over a year, until the house burned down and the Brights sold for nothing and pulled out for Indianapolis.

  The pamphlet concludes with a two-page interview of the Brights together, “Interviewer” not named, describing how they managed. Opal knew: “Ron, it’s time for a visit.” She felt the touch. Elvis was always considerate, pleasant, “soft with his hands and voice,” agreed the husband and wife, and the King was both “respectful and regretful,” Ron Bright said, “about having to ask me to leave the bedroom for their time alone. But I never minded it”—nor minded that during the interview his wife called Elvis “the lover of my lifetime.” The wife and husband both agreed that above all, Elvis was sad, “ghostly and sad.”

  Like a cat, Sinbad II leapt onto a kitchen chair and started napping. Mark poured coffee into two cups resting between burners on the gas range—the kitchen table being occupied by his display of documentary loot. “Altogether, the bits of evidence on this table cost me just over three grand.” He plucked up a page by its corner—“Estes, Franks and Herman. Big Memphis law firm. Greedy about their fees, but I can trust their investigators.” Tapping the paper: “Estes hangs out with John Grisham.”

  He began to read: “ ‘Anthony Rogers Restell, born January eight, nineteen thirty-five, mother Sarah Jane Restell, father unknown, birth certificate copy attached. Graduated Central High School, 1953. No Social Security number on record.’

  “ ‘In answer to your queries,’ blah blah…the difference between computerized files and filed documents, boring, boring…Here we go: ‘We can state with certain
ty that Anthony Rogers Restell has generated no record of activity in the U.S. since 1975. With less certainty, but with confidence, we can state that since graduating from Central High School in Memphis in June 1953, Anthony Rogers Restell has left no state or federal record of activity in the U.S. Conclusion: The Anthony Rogers Restell named on the attached birth certificate is (1) deceased without record, or (2) permanently relocated overseas, or (3) living in the U.S. under a long-established alias.’

  “Last, but not least—‘Please advise if you would like copies of Central High School yearbooks 1950–53, as previously discussed, and we will provide you with a cost estimate for this service.’ Heck yes I would like those yearbooks. But at eight hundred each, I settled for 1953, senior year.” With an accompanying little dance move, he flung back a green plush cover and turned through glossy pages with his pinky raised—“Here’s an interesting face. This gal is now fifty-five years old and has a restraining order out against me.”

  A glance and you knew it was a school yearbook, another glance and you could tell these were high school Americans after World War II. Ahearn placed a finger beside a face: a charming young woman of the 1950s. A partial smile, a tilted gaze, perfect curls, the scarf and rollers probably just removed in the Girls’ Room. Only the black and white head shot, but I could imagine the brown and white saddle shoes, the ankle-length bobby sox, the pleated skirt covering her leg to just below the knee. The tentative smile would indicate a history of braces, but she was coming out of that now, and better than she realized. She wore what they called a peasant blouse, a sleeveless cotton pullover with an elastic neckline that could be lowered, when Mom and Dad weren’t around, to expose the shoulders and show a bit of cleavage while vamping with a cigarette or sipping soda through a straw. The image struck me hard, knocked me right back to age seven. I remembered spying and eavesdropping on these very boys and girls and thinking them the most sophisticated people in the world.