The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Read online

  I followed this orderly not into a tiny examination room, but instead onto a brightly lit stage in an auditorium filled with hundreds of people—medical students, as best I could make out against the glare illuminating me. Nobody had warned me I’d be exhibited. In the center of the stage, under blinding lamps of the kind portrait photographers use, the orderly helped me onto a gurney and posed me on my back like a calendar girl, the knee raised, the robe parted, my bare leg displayed.

  In those days I took recreational drugs at every opportunity, and about an hour earlier, as a way of preparing for this experience, or maybe just by coincidence, I’d ingested a lot of LSD, which had the effect of focusing my awareness more acutely on the pain in the knee, at the same time unmasking pain, in itself, as something cosmically funny, as well as revealing the overwhelming, eternal vitality of the universe, especially of the dark, surrounding audience, who breathed and sighed in unison, like one huge creature.

  The head of Orthopedics approached me. He was either a large, almost gigantic person, or a person who only seemed gigantic under the circumstances. He gripped my flesh with his seething monster-hands and delivered a lecture while he manipulated my lower leg and fondled the joint in preparation, I felt pretty sure, of eating me. “Now you’ll see how the disfigured cartilage causes the joint to seize,” he said, but he couldn’t produce the effect, and went on straightening and bending the leg at the knee and talking jibber-jabber. Meanwhile, I observed that the Great Void of Extinction was swallowing the whole of reality at an impossible rate of speed, and yet nothing could overcome our continual birthing into the present.

  The Colossus of Orthopedics clamped my thigh with one hand and my ankle with the other and cranked the lower leg around gently, then not so gently, saying, “Sometimes it takes a bit of fiddling.” Still the knee didn’t lock. Before this vast audience of his students, he pronounced me a faker. “There’s no condition here requiring any treatment at all,” he said. He pointed at me with a finger that communicated billions of accusations simultaneously. “A lot of these young men are out to fool the medical establishment, because they don’t want to get drafted.”

  It was easy enough for me to get the knee to lock. I just had to bend my leg so the knee was raised and turn my foot forty-five degrees to the right. The noise it made when it locked was disgusting—a horrid, gulping thunk. The sound came from the pre-chaotic depths, where good and evil were one thing.

  “Ah—you see,”—the mammoth said to his compatriot, the darkness. “Now you see!” I understood this to mean he was about to turn me invisible, and soon after that he’d amuse the students by making me explode. Then I grasped that he was an orthopedic specialist who, having failed to get the knee locked until I’d done it for him, was now going to show his students how to unlock it again. But he couldn’t do that either. After a lot of huffing and puffing and mumbo jumbo, he collapsed in his inwardmost self and prayed unto the darkness for help, and his prayer was heard.

  The darkness furnished forth the Unlocker, who seemed a loving emanation, then a mysterious becoming, then a glorious actuality, and at last a sort of porky med student, who leapt onto my knee hind-end-first, as you’d do if you wanted to shut a bulging suitcase. Again the great sound, the Gulp of God, and my bones were restored, and with an infinitude of applause too wonderful for human ears, Creation burst its beginnings. The hero took my hand, and, having been exhibited before the All, having been lain out, and locked, and unlocked, at his touch I was able to rise, and walk.

  In the quiet hallway I sat down alone. The man who’d been talking on the payphone was still there, still talking, as if nothing had ever happened. I strained to hear his magical words. For what it’s worth, I’ll repeat them here. He said: “Your dog. Your dog. Your dog. You were a fool to leave your dog with me.”

  You’re writing about one thing, next second about something else—things medical—things literary—things ghostly—and onto the empty page steps a novelist named Darcy Miller. Among other books, Darcy wrote one called Ever the Wrong Man, which became a movie in 1982—Darcy also wrote the screenplay. He published as D. Hale Miller. Incidentally, I’m aware it’s the convention in these semi-autobiographical tales—these pseudo-fictional memoirs—to disguise people’s names, but I haven’t done that…Has thinking of Link, my sick friend, brought Darcy to mind? The two men were quite similar, each ending up alone in his sixties, resigned and self-sufficient, each one living, so to speak, as his own widow. And then the ebbing of self-sufficiency, the gradual decline—gradual in Link’s case, and in Darcy’s quite a bit swifter.

  I made Darcy’s acquaintance in the year 2000 in Austin, Texas, where he lived in an old house on an abandoned ranch. That sounds glummer than it was. Darcy had come there for a four-month period at the invitation of the University of Texas, which owned the ranch and maintained the premises, and he got a stipend, probably a meager one, but anyway he had a roof over his head, and he wasn’t broke. I happened to be teaching a writing course at the university that same semester, and one day in early spring I led my dozen graduate students, in three cars, out to the old place to hold our class there as Darcy’s guests. We headed west out of Austin, first onto backcountry roads and then off the paved byways entirely, crossing two large ranches on a miles-long dirt easement and meeting a series of widely separated gates we had to unlock and open (I’d been given the combinations on a slip of paper) and shut and lock behind us. By the odometer we traveled three dozen miles, no more, and on the map we moved well short of one-half degree westward in longitude, but Austin is situated such that this brief journey took us out of the lush southeastern part of Texas and into the scrubby semidesert of the state’s southwestern half, where you need ten acres of this mean, miserly grass, an old cowboy once told me, to keep one head of cattle from starving; fording with a splash and gurgle a tiny creek within sight of the house and the stables behind it, passing under creekside cottonwoods and shaggy willows, planted long ago for windbreaks and now grown monumentally large, and swinging around Darcy’s car, a well used fake-luxury Chrysler parked just across the creek and still some distance from the house, as if it had made it very nearly the whole way and then given up.

  Darcy seemed like that too, a little. He had tousled reddish hair and puffy features and looked something like a child snatched from a nap. He had ice-blue, very shiny, bloodshot eyes, and on his cheeks and across his nose the burst capillaries once known as “gin blossoms.” We gathered behind the house on a patio of broken flagstones—the interior was a bit too small for entertaining. Darcy served us iced tea poured from two large pitchers into old canning jars, and that’s what he drank, too, as he described for us the stages, a better word is paroxysms, by which his first novel had become a successful movie more than a decade after its publication. First the producers added years to the hero’s age and signed John Wayne; some weeks into the development process, however, John Wayne died. They dialed back the hero’s age and cast Rip Torn, Darcy told our class as we sat around a crude wooden table in the willows’ shade, but Rip Torn got arrested, not for the first time, or the last, and then an actor named Curt Wellson turned up, absolutely perfect for the role, the success of the project so assured by this young man’s unprecedented talent that he held out for an unprecedented fee for his services, lost his chance, and was never heard of again. Clint Eastwood liked it, and said so for nearly two years before negotiations hit a wall. In a fit of silliness, pure folly, the producers took an offer to Paul Newman. Newman accepted. The film was shot, cut, and distributed, and it did all right for everybody involved.

  Nothing much had happened since then to D. Hale Miller, at least not in the eyes of my students, that was plain, although for better than thirty years he’d survived, and occasionally thrived, as a writer—of unproduced scripts, uncollected magazine articles, and two more novels after Ever the Wrong Man. All three books had gone out of print.

  Throughout our visit Darcy seemed in good spirits and in command of hims
elf. He dealt generously with the works under discussion, though he addressed the students—men and women in their mid-twenties—as “you children.” He wore baggy Wrangler jeans, a light checked short-sleeved shirt, and flip-flop zoris, their yellow straps gripping mythically horrible feet—knobby, veiny, with toenails like talons. I shouldn’t have been staring at them, but shortly into the visit I found I didn’t like my students’ attitude and wished we hadn’t come here, and I focused on such irrelevant details as Darcy’s feet in order to cancel out the rest, the physical vastness of empty Texas, the heartfelt, demoralized lowing of distant cattle, the buzzards hanging in the sky, all of that, and in particular the young writers around the table, attentive, encouraging, yet thoroughly dismissive. They could see Darcy’s exile but not his battered nobility. The waves had rolled him half-alive onto foreign sands, and now he was sipping his tea, commenting on our attempted stories, and slowly shifting the position of his left elbow to dislodge a fly that kept landing on it. I’m not sure how the day ended and I don’t remember the trip back into Austin, but I recall stopping at a video rental shop later that night, or on a night soon after, looking for a copy of Ever the Wrong Man. The store’s catalog listed the title, but it was missing from the shelves.

  That was my first encounter with Darcy Miller. The next one came five or six weeks later, after I got a completely unexpected message at work: I’d received a phone call from the writer Gerald Sizemore, G. H. Sizemore on his books and Jerry to his acquaintances. As soon as I got his message I called him back, and after a quick hello he went right to the point: “I want you to go out and see Darcy Miller. I’m worried about him.”

  I’d never met Gerald Sizemore, and we’d never even corresponded, but it didn’t surprise me that I was known to him and that he felt, moreover, that he could ask of me just about any favor, because some years earlier I’d written an introduction for the twentieth anniversary edition of his first novel, The Reason I’m Lost, published in 1972 and now, as I’d argued in my preface for it, an American classic. Like Darcy Miller, Sizemore had published three books but had lived mainly as a screenwriter, with fair success; had written many scripts, including one he co-authored in the early 1970s with, as he told me now, Darcy Miller: a romantic romp starring Peter Fonda and Shelley Duvall that had been filmed in its entirety but never actually finished—a union strike interfered with post-production; the studio changed hands and the new owners filed for Chapter Eleven; in the middle of it all the chief cinematographer ran away to Mexico with the director’s wife; and so on—and therefore never distributed. I’d been completely unaware of Gerald Sizemore’s connection with Darcy Miller. Jerry, as he invited me to call him, described his and Darcy’s alliance as reaching back into their twenties, and the plot, such as it was, of The Reason I’m Lost paralleled the course of their friendship as young writers learning their craft in the San Francisco scene of the early 1960s. Later, in the 1970s, after the hungry years, Darcy and Jerry shared their successes together—books coming out, a movie being made, money coming in. That was back when writers were still sort of important and, as with athletes, “promise” draped even the unproven ones with a certain glamor. I’ll offer myself as an example: I was, in those days, eighteen and nineteen and twenty years old, and newspapers in Chicago and Des Moines ran articles about me because I was someday going to be a writer—I wasn’t one yet, I was just going to be, and on the strength of this expectation I was invited to ladies’ clubs throughout the Midwest to read from the couple of dozen existing pages of my work and answer questions from club members, and there were two or three of these mid-western, middle-aged, formerly good-looking women I could probably have seduced (though I lacked magnetism and still had acne) because in 1972 it would have been an adventure to be seduced by a figure of future literary prominence, and later watch him rise. Meanwhile, Darcy and Jerry were having the time of their lives as figures of current literary prominence, adventuring with currently good-looking women, mostly in Darcy’s big home by the Pacific in Humboldt County, California. That would have been around the moment of my fame as a medical curiosity at the University Hospital—I told you about that—which is maybe why that old college memory surfaced a bit ago, and there’s the fresher memory, too, of my recent experience taking care of my close friend Link; and those two memories together led me to recollect Darcy and…but we’ve already mentioned the conjoining of these memories, so what’s the fuss? I’ll get on with it. Jerry was worried about his old friend. “I don’t know what’s going on out there,” he said, “at that ranch, or farm, or—”

  “The Campesino Place.”

  “So it’s a place?”

  “In Texas, a ranch would be thousands of acres. A couple hundred is just a place.”

  “Darcy doesn’t answer his phone, and his message machine is full—anyway it drills your ear with this endless, screaming beep, and then it hangs up, and I assume that means it’s full—and for more than a week now I can’t get a rise out of the guy. The lady at the Writing Center—Mrs.—”

  “Mrs. Exroy—”

  “Mrs. Exroy. Interesting name. She says you saw Darcy a couple months ago. Did he seem all right?”

  “He seemed fine to me. I mean, he’s how old—?”

  “He’s sixty-seven. The thing is, before he stopped answering the phone, he called me several days in a row to bitch and complain about his brother. Says his brother and his sister-in-law turned up last month, and he can’t make them leave. They’re messing up the kitchen, drinking his liquor, getting in his way.”

  “So maybe it’s not such a concern, then, if he’s got family there—”

  “No. I’m very concerned.”

  “But if his brother’s there—”

  “His brother’s been dead for ten years.”

  This was the kind of moment when, in the distant past, I’d put a cigarette between my lips and light up and take a drag—but I don’t smoke now—in order not to seem stupefied.

  “They’re both deceased. The sister-in-law died more recently.”

  I said, “Ah-hah.”

  “She died in ’95. I went to both their funerals.”

  I said again ah-hah.

  “So Darcy Miller’s hanging around with a couple of ghosts,” Jerry said, “or claims to be.”

  I promised him I’d get out there and have a look.

  As soon as we’d said goodbye, I tried Darcy’s number without even putting down the receiver. Following several ring tones came a long, long beep, and the connection ended. Only then did I place the receiver in its cradle on my desk. I was in my office at the Writers’ Center, which looked down, on the window side, at the four lanes of Keaton Street and, through the doorway on my left, at the grandly proportioned mesquite table around which we gathered our seminars. The conference room itself was a modest space lined with shelves of books, once the study of the Texas author Benjamin Franklin Brewer and still containing the old pale green—springtime green—leather reclining chair in which Brewer sat and read, and made his notes, and, one day, stretched out and died. The building had formerly been Brewer’s home. At the moment, around four on a Friday afternoon, I had the upper floor to myself—three offices, a bathroom (with tub) and the conference room. Sometimes, when alone up here like this and trapped in a melancholy mood, I sat in the recliner and operated its antique mechanism and lay back and tried to imagine the going out of Benjamin Franklin Brewer’s last breath. Under the influence of these surroundings, I thought I’d better go right now and look in on Darcy Miller.

  Downstairs I got the combinations for the gate locks from the center’s administrative assistant—this was Mrs. Exroy, a plump, diligently pleasant older southern widow who liked to stand on the back porch and smoke cigarettes while gazing at the little ravine and the creek out back of the building, as if the trickle of water carried her thoughts away. She always brought to my mind the phrase “sweet sorrow.”

  I got on the road not long after 4 p.m. Right away the traffic ensnar
led me, if that’s a word, and it was well past five by the time I came to the dirt roads. It seemed to me I’d reach Darcy’s home with plenty of daylight left, but I wasn’t sure of any daylight coming back; to save troubling with the combinations later in the dark I left the gate locks open and dangling, a scandalous breach of cowboy etiquette, but one I expected to go unnoticed because from horizon to horizon, as I realized now, making the trip this time without passengers to divert me, not a single shelter was visible, and I saw nothing, really, other than the gates and the miles of smooth wire fencing, to suggest that anybody cared what went on here or even knew of the existence of this place. I passed a few longhorn steers, or bulls, or cows, I couldn’t have said which, a very few, each standing all alone beneath the burden of a pair of horns that reach, from tip to tip, “up to seven feet,” according to absolutely every article I’ve ever seen about these animals; they wear out the phrase. Here in the Americas we trace the longhorn line back to the livestock cargo of Columbus’s second expedition to the New World, and farther back, of course, in the Old World, to a scattered population of eighty or so wild aurochs domesticated in the Middle East more than ten thousand years ago, the forebears of all the cattle living now under human dominion. In 1917 the University of Texas adopted as its mascot a longhorn steer named “Bevo.” As far as I’ve been able to determine, the two syllables mean nothing and may derive from the word “beef.” In 2004, a successor Bevo—Bevo the Fourteenth—attended George W. Bush’s presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C.

  At the fourth gate, the final one, I knelt before the lock while my Subaru idled behind me. Way up the straight road I could make out the willows and cottonwoods surrounding Darcy’s house, and looking at my destination and the half mile of empty ground between us, I was overwhelmed by a clear, complete appreciation of the physical distance behind me, as if I’d walked the twenty-some-odd miles rather than driven across the landscape in a car. A few minutes later, when I came in sight of the creek, I witnessed a school of vultures, the huge redheaded scavengers called in these parts turkey buzzards, nine or ten of them, eleven, I couldn’t count, orbiting above the house on spiral currents. I stopped my car and watched. The truth is I was afraid to go any farther—no word from the house’s occupant for many days, and now these circling creatures, taken everywhere as omens of death because they forage by smell, scouting the thermal drafts that carry them for any whiff of ethyl mercaptan, the first in the series of compounds propagated by carnal putrefaction and one recognizable to many of us, I’ve since learned, as the agent added to natural gas in order to make it stink. Floating above the house, the buzzards looked no more substantial than burning pages, gliding very gradually downward but then, after no perceptible alteration or adjustment, gliding upward, mounting high enough to seem no longer invested in the scene below, wherein none of the things—Darcy’s car, the house, the row of six whitewashed stables roofed with black asphalt shingles—seemed out of the ordinary, but neither did anything seem to move. Suddenly I felt as if the view before me had shrunk to the size of a tabletop. To the east, hundreds of meters beyond the buildings, the buzzards’ shadows raced over the scrubby tangles of a mesquite chaparral like the shadows of a mobile in a child’s bedroom. I engaged the accelerator and moved forward—shrinking now, myself, in order to enter among the miniatures and the toys.