The Last Fair Deal Going Down, page 7
Will stayed in What Cheer for three weeks and then returned to Des Moines, satisfied. His image of Cedar Stern had a beginning. Safely, he could now begin his total construction of Cedar, complete to the last detail. Babyhood did not interest him. What came before the adolescence was irrelevant to Will because he was only concerned with Cedar as a woman, specifically with the kind of woman she was in contrast to the kind of woman she pictured herself to be; therefore, her earlier years — those spannings of time when her most frightening nightmares could at best only make generalizations about what insanity might be like — were of no concern to him. In his notebook he wrote:
Today I have seen the beginning of a pattern, a living obsession, a metaphysic. And like all patterns in their earlier stages it is impossible to know the precise nature of that pattern. I have before me (within me) a collection of seemingly unrelated symbols, like the numbers 3.14 that on first observation might appear sporadic or merely coincidental without the awareness that the series π is in actuality an infinitely repeating series just as definite as the series .3333. . . . I shall painstakingly continue to uncover the other numbers of the series until I arrive at the common repeating series 142857142857142857 . . . and so arrive at the simple fraction 22/7. The mistake of the morons I have known is anticipated in their belief that the chaotic actions of a young girl (and a woman, though less pronounced) are indeed chaotic. They have failed to see that every woman is held together by a central series, an obsession or metaphysic that orders that chaos. There are no ambiguities in a woman. They are simple . . . prevented by their partial awareness of themselves and by the man-oriented world to contain any discrepancies. “Women are infinitely shallow.” It is only our greedy acceptance of the unexplainable that renders them complex. It would be banal to attempt to possess a young girl in that her pattern, or obsession, has not been fully developed. They, the girls, will eventually grow out around any estimation of them because that estimation will always be incomplete. A young girl cannot conceive of what it means to be permanently deranged . . . is not aware that anything internal to herself stands between her and the good life. I will come to know Cedar Stern’s obsession better than she does herself. I will possess her. She will cease to live but through me. My lungs will breathe air into her body. I will know love.
In the mornings Will was awakened by Cedar’s alarm clock. He quietly got out of bed and watched her pull on her bathrobe through his vision-tube. (Will had given up the convenience of the telescope for the intense communion that the knowledge of less physical space between them gave to him.) She then went into the bathroom and Will followed her into his own and from his other vision-tube watched her urinate, defecate, and brush her teeth. Through his earphones he listened to her walk downstairs, greet the dog and cat, feed the fish from an orange box of dry fish food, expertly, never too much, open two cans of food for Felix and Duchess, put the food in plastic bowls, place the cat’s dish at one end of the kitchen and the dog’s at the other (Felix ate closer to the sink area), fill a metal pan with water and put it on the gas stove, turn on the fire under it and walk upstairs. Back at the vision-tube he watched as she remade the bed, took off her robe, placing it back in the bureau, removed her nightgown and hid it carefully under one of the pillows on the twin-size bed, and standing naked, combed her hair in front of the full-length mirror with short, inaccurate, almost casual strokes. She first put on a pair of underpants, always a little too large for her, and then a bra, never used more than three days without washing (unnecessarily, because she had eight bras and did laundry every week, on Saturday, although she never wore the bra with the heavy cords or the black one). The next item of apparel was a garter belt, stockings, then a full-length slip which she smoothed down and adjusted in front of the mirror before putting on a blouse and skirt (infrequently she wore a dress from her selection of nine). After choosing a pair of shoes, usually the brown, she went back downstairs to rescue the boiling water from the stove and make one cup of instant coffee, pouring the extra water down the sink, and causing Will’s headphones to make a noise like Pssssssssssss. Felix and Duchess would be finished eating by then and would follow her with the cup of coffee into the living room, and while she sat on the sofa drinking the brew with short sipping sounds, would engage herself in a monologue with the animals. The topics of these conversations were sprung from either outstanding remarkable events of the day before — dog chases cat up lamp pole and lamp pole falls down — or expectations of the coming afternoon or weekend — taking animals for a long walk, going to the zoo, or a visit from her father or sister. Occasionally she would talk to them about matters that they had no interest in whatsoever. (These would become of special interest to Will and he listened to them over and over again during the day while Cedar was at work, but never without playing the entire tape of the morning and remembering her actions that he had recorded in a notebook and reread during the appropriate intervals for fear that he might draw a wrong conclusion by taking them out of context.) She took the empty cup into the kitchen and put it in the sink. Then, putting on a coat if the weather was even questionably chilly, would take the cat and dog out into the backyard while Will studied her face through his telescope, trying to lip-read. After ten minutes she would bring the animals back into the house, pick up her pocketbook and any letters she had written the night before from the dining room table, and lock the door behind her as she left.
This was a typical morning. The sequence of events rarely varied during the week and was for the most part only elongated on the weekends. But sometimes Cedar Stern changed her schedule — on certain days she would refuse to feed the cat, or the dog, or both, or would let them out of the house to vandalize the neighborhood for the rest of the day. These digressions were crucial to Will, and because they were infrequent (only three or four times a month) it took him a half year to pinpoint the causal relationship between those changes of pattern and other changes of pattern during the morning or preceding night, disregarding a certain randomness common to everyone.
Will then remained the full day in his room listening to the tape recorder, copying down her words in a notebook to add more objectivity and distance to his thinking, recreating her naked body before the mirror with his memory, circling phrases and drawing arrows, looking at photographs, reading letters, writing out in longhand possible solutions, reading those solutions in light of previously written solutions as a safeguard against oversimplification, and thinking. His last entry under “Mornings” read:
The sound that Cedar Stern’s alarm makes in the morning is precise and acute. She does not let it ring, but slams down on the button with such force that I can hear the shaking of the night table. This is one of the many examples of her hatred of machinery: she has no automobile, only the absolutely necessary electrical appliances, told Reuben that she had no time to fix the stove, has several times thrown her key to the floor when it refused to fit easily and immediately into the front door lock, has a piece of leather that she ties around the collar of Duchess instead of a simple chain with a snap, refuses to clean the refrigerator while keeping the rest of the house immaculate, does not have a wristwatch, yells “shut up” when the phone rings, has called in the television repairman twice when the dog accidentally brushed against the brightness control, turning the picture tube black, and threw her radio away after it started buzzing.
Cedar Stern is a moral woman; however, not without specific reservations. She feeds the animals before herself but not before she urinates and brushes her teeth, yet before she dresses. The fish feeding comes before the dog and cat for the reason that the responsibility of the fish is deeper because it is unaware of her coming downstairs — the dog and cat know they will be fed; therefore, they can wait. Cedar Stern not only must feed the fish, she must also remember to be conscious of the fish’s hunger and remember to feed it.
When Cedar does not feed the dog and cat (or either one of them) it is because they have too overtly demanded to be fed. She is aware that the animals are not living in a natural state but are dependent on her for their lives and serve as instruments toward her pleasure. This situation is both necessary and repugnant to her — life-giving and god-playing. The fish, however, because of its complete sublimity can be always a small creature and a symbol for all of life; the glass bowl, the aerator and the manufactured fish food — because the fish is unaware of them — are not unnatural.
Cedar’s motivation for leaving the animals to run loose around the neighborhood during the day is two-sided, two radically conflicting yet complementing desires are at work; first a desire for the animals to be free and unhindered in their movements; secondly a desire for their destruction from an automobile or an irate neighbor. These mornings usually follow a series of three or four days wherein Cedar suffers from ennui, thought-gazing. Her morning discussion with the animals during these four days becomes increasingly less specific, tending almost toward free association. In the last day, the very presence of the animals, their dumbness and spontaneous apathy, is irritating. She chases them out into the backyard, barricades the door behind them, but before leaving for work I can hear her pulling the kitchen curtains aside — only an inch, perhaps less, to see if they are still in the yard.
There is something special about a woman who in the morning looks into a mirror at her naked body. Many, perhaps most women, enjoy looking at themselves for even luxurious intervals at night or in the afternoon following a hot bath or shower and perform elaborate rituals with bathrobes and towels and underpants and changes of expressions. And Cedar is not an exception to these. But a woman who consciously pays attention to, looks at, and so admires her unclothed body in the morning is abnormal. She is aware that this communication between herself and her beautiful body is breaking a mystical norm and so brushes her hair with short, careless, choppy movements instead of long, steady, rhythmic, fondling strokes that characterize her night brushings. Despite the guilt she never relinquishes her morning encounter with her natural self and even turns around and looks over her shoulder at her rounded buttocks and soft thighs.
Cedar’s insistence on putting on her underpants (always a little too large — they bunch up during the day and must be uncomfortable) before her bra is, like the short careless brushing of her hair, a reaction against her indulgence at the mirror and a check against any further indulgences. After she has put on her bra (I do not believe that Cedar was given the black bra — no, she bought it one day downtown after watching an exciting movie or prompted by a clerk she used to know from high school . . . or for some other reason and then later, in the morning, was ashamed to wear it) her reaction against her embarrassment brings her back again to the mirror, where she smooths down her slip around her hips. Her body now essentially hidden, the rest of the dressing is business and the brown shoes are chosen because they are older and more “common” than the others and reinforce her belief that she has nothing superficially to offer anyone — that her clothes are the moat between the wonderful castle of herself and the world, and that like the stone of the castle, its ordinariness only serves to enhance the beauty and magnificence inside. And with this secret she goes to work. And because of this secret she is able to live in the way that she does.
Will’s apartment filled with flat, brown notebooks of character sketches, even short stories — fictional episodes that a fictional Cedar Stern, endowed with the attributes of the real Cedar Stern, was forced to encounter. In this manner Will was able to imagine Cedar Stern in situations that were not available to his notice, and in many cases, her own. And so his understanding of her grew even larger than was possible within the confines of the house.
In the beginning of this fiction-writing period, which only lasted about three months, he was attentively narrow-minded toward his character and material. His concerns were thematic and determinedly held to the focus of single ideas; however, by the end of this period his “stories” became groundless emotional statements of Cedar Stern, written in the first person and entitled such things as “Thoughts before I go to Sleep” and “When Love Comes to Me.” (The ink on these pages was smeared . . . sweating, I believe.)
Will soon gave up creative writing because of what he complained of in one of his notebooks as “emotional impurity — the impossibility of keeping an idea or sensation simple and clean while also attempting to warp that sensation or idea into a shape resembling a form.” He found mechanical drawing to be more calming and his apartment began to look like an architect’s basement. The control that was demanded in drawing straight lines added an amount of keenness to his mind and allowed his wondering thoughts to condense into concrete propositions and statements while his hands erected miniature towers and buildings with friezes.
Every so often, in the evening, Cedar Stern would masturbate. Will was particularly interested in this activity, more so than the animal conversations, the morning dressing, or the childhood picture albums. He learned to predict those sexual nights by Cedar’s expression walking up the stairs: half-closed eyes, flushed color, quick breathing, and absentmindedness. He moved the microphone over to a bedpost in order to pick up the slightest vibration from the bed, or words that she might unconsciously speak (or consciously, for the excitement of hearing some particular word or words said out loud, even by herself).
Cedar Stern talked little while she masturbated. Occasionally she would mumble a group of words unintelligible to even Will’s sensitive recording device, and infrequently she would pronounce groups of words resembling, “No . . . n . . . no . . . No, NO,” or “Now . . . now . . . NOW,” or “Stop . . . NO . . . stop.” Will was disappointed. The words could obviously be nothing more than sexual words, easy to say, with long O sounds, or in the case of “stop,” sibilancy. This probability — the immediate verbal pleasure that each of the words afforded — overrode any symbolic interpretation they might have had for her . . . and Will did not finally attempt to assign meanings allegorical or otherwise to the words because “no” and “now” and “stop” were in fact his own favorite words during his own monosexual experiences. The knowledge that Cedar’s choice of words was indeed his own strengthened the growing intimacy between them, and to his almost uncontrollable delight Will managed to arrange several of his affairs with himself at a time corresponding to Cedar’s; and with his headphones on his head he could listen to his beloved talking to him in his own language while he stroked toward his satisfaction under the mind’s eye of Cedar mouthing those words.
After overcoming his initial excitement of secretly participating in Cedar’s masturbating, Will became attentive to the circumstances that brought Cedar up the stairs with her eyes half closed and cheeks flushed. He was happy to notice that those circumstances were never so simple as a television program or a magazine article. Occasionally a novel would stimulate a smile not fully humorous and she would begin playing with the edges of her bedclothes; and Will wrote down the name of the book and the estimated page number to look up the following day. This is misleading: Cedar never bought books that were written for just that purpose, probably for fear that when she bought one the man at the paperback stand, after taking her money, would either find out her phone number and write it down in every telephone booth in town, or zip down his fly and expose himself in front of her in a knowing way. No, Cedar always bought good books, or at least books that sold relatively well, and was pleasantly affected when one of them turned out to be a “bad” book in disguise, or hidden among thousands of pages of sophisticated verbal zigzag puzzles was a scene that made her whole body go warm. One of these scenes was in a Des Moines best-seller named Love’s Carriage, by Ruth Cartney. The story is about a young girl’s life in California and her consequential suicide in the face of unimaginable forces:
Teresa walked along the silent beach and felt the terrible force of the sea as though the very fact that she was there and alone was reason enough for the sea to reach out and carry her away. She pulled the light dress over her head and slipped out of her underpants and bra. The wind from the ocean was moist and caressed her rich breasts and thighs with quiet fingers. Her hair blew back from her face and she walked out toward the water where the lapping waves pulled at her tiny feet and ankles, begging her to give herself up to the call of the sea, to return once again to the womb of all creation.
“Teresa, Teresa,” a voice called from the house. She did not hear, but walked out still farther, her heart beating steadily now. The fear had passed and she was at one with the sea.
