62: We are all obliged, . . .
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” the Preface begins
Preface
We are all obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Within a Budding Grove (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
OF THE DIFFICULTIES that arose during the writing of “The Static of the Spheres,” no other posed so intriguing a set of challenges as the need to create a preoccupation for Guppa, something that he could do in his living room of an evening, in the quiet hours after dinner, that would be the equivalent of his practicing culling clams.
Guppa’s clam-culling skills were legendary. When he had worked on the line at the clam-packing plant, he had been an inspiration to anyone who worked beside him, and at the annual Clam Fests he had won the culling competition for twelve years in succession, a record that stands to this day. When he became foreman of the culling section and retired from active day-in-and-day-out culling, he practiced at home in the evenings to keep his hand in, so that when a new culler joined the crew or when Guppa thought that the work was slowing, he could step over to the galvanized table where the clams were dumped and put on a display of speed and accuracy that was still dazzling, still inspiring.
So that he could practice at home, in the privacy of his own living room, while listening to the radio, and later while watching television, he would arrange in a semicircle in front of his favorite comfy chair a set of peck baskets into which, while blindfolded—or at least, during the television years, without looking—he would toss clams that were randomly arranged in a bushel basket between his feet. Arranging the clams randomly again after Guppa had culled them became my job as soon as I was old enough to perform it.
At first, immediately after Guppa had retired from active culling, he had used clams straight from the bay, but these quickly became too smelly for Gumma to tolerate. For her part, Gumma liked to spend an evening curled up on the sofa with a slide rule and a book of recreational mathematics problems, very much as I have described in the pages that follow. She said that the stink of the clams made it hard for her to think straight, that the clams reeked and her head reeled. So Guppa and I undertook a project that threw us together for long and happy hours in the cellar, at his workbench. We constructed practice clams. Guppa would open the clams and remove the edible portion. I would scrape the insides of the shells clean and wash and dry them thoroughly. Together we mixed mortar to use as ballast in each clam, so that the heft would be realistic. Guppa measured varying amounts of the mortar for each clam, so that each would vary a bit from the average weight for clams their size, which Gumma calculated, throwing herself into the problem with great intensity, covering sheets of paper with notes and numbers. Guppa spooned the right amount of mortar into a clean valve, and then after the mortar was dry I glued the opposite valve to it.
The memories of the time that we spent in the cellar, working together, are among the most pleasant of my childhood. I would gladly have related them just as they were, and would probably have called this work “The Cement Clams,” but in “My Mother Takes a Tumble” I had made Guppa a Studebaker salesman rather than a foreman in the culling section of the clam-packing plant, and now I felt that I was stuck with that story, just as I found myself stuck with the little lie about the hard candies that my great-grandmother offered me in “Do Clams Bite?” So, I worked out a comparable kind of practice for a Studebaker salesman of the first rank: categorizing potential buyers according to the sales pitch most likely to succeed with each—culling of another sort.
So far, so good. I thought that I would call this “All in the Cards.” Ah, but then when I tried to imagine Guppa and my ten-year-old self passing happy hours in the cellar at work filling out note cards, I realized that it was not a project that would have held my attention for the long periods that constructing practice clams had, and so I cast about for something else that Guppa and I could do together in the cellar. I put myself back in Gumma and Guppa’s living room and looked around for something that might inspire me. To my surprise and relief, the solution came to me at once. I found myself twisting the dials on Gumma’s magnificent multi-band radio and wishing that I had one like it. Guppa and I would build a shortwave radio.
THE SECOND MOST VEXING PROBLEM arose after I wrote the sentence that now stands as the last one in the bathroom scene. At once, I began to have misgivings about the whole scene. I meant to go on, and I meant to be quite frank, but I hesitated, because I realized that the scene would succeed only if it were at once frank and delicate. I didn’t want to seem prudish, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself either. I didn’t want to describe the bathtub shenanigans that I had concocted for Eliza and me in a way that would mean injuring Eliza or disturbing the perilous balance that I had in mind for this work.
I went downstairs to the lobby, where Albertine was behind the desk, working on the accounts. I lit a cigarette and began pacing up and down. Al didn’t look up. I began sighing whenever I passed the desk, but still she didn’t look up. I began muttering “damn-damn-damn” under my breath. Al put her pencil down and leaned on the desk.
“Okay,” she said. “I hear you. What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
“I’ll give you two minutes,” she said. She went back to work.
After about a minute and a half, I said, “Well, I’m having doubts about a scene in which Eliza is giving me a bath. I think it’s very important, because it leads to the confusion of motives for my wanting the shortwave radio—the mixture of sexual desire, jealousy, pride, anger, and my simple ingenuous hankering for a shortwave radio. But I’m afraid that if it isn’t handled just right it will look like an unnecessary sex scene and that it will embarrass Eliza to boot.”
“Why don’t you ask Eliza what she thinks?” she suggested.
My jaw dropped. Al and I have been married for more than twenty years, but still there are times when I am not sure whether she possesses a surpassing understanding, an uncanny percipience, or is just not listening to me most of the time.
“There is no Eliza,” I said. “I made her up.”
Al looked at me as if I were a nitwit and went back to work. I trudged back upstairs. At least half an hour passed before I decided what to do. I dialed the desk from the phone in my workroom.
“Small’s Hotel,” answered Al.
“Al,” I said. “Will you be Eliza?”
“Will you take me to lunch?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said.
“Sure,” said Al.
[to be continued on Monday, August 9, 2021]
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