63: I telephoned Eliza . . .
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” the Preface concludes
I TELEPHONED ELIZA AT ONCE to invite her to have lunch with me. Eliza is now sixty-three. After Dudley Beaker died, she stayed on in the stucco house on No Bridge Road, at the end of which there is now a bridge.
“Hello?” she said, in the small and tentative tone she uses to answer the phone, as if she expected a call from a creditor or a grasping relative.
“Eliza,” I said. “It’s Peter.”
“Peter, darling,” she said, switching at once to the voice she uses with friends, a voice like velvet or cognac or pot de crême.
“Eliza, will you have lunch with me?” I asked.
“Oh, I think that would be delightful,” she said. “When would that be?”
“How about one-thirty?”
“Oh, you mean today.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, yes, fine. I wonder if I have anything that I can wear? I’m standing here in a Chinese robe. You don’t think I could wear that, do you? No. I know what, why don’t you and the gorgeous Albertine come here, and I will fix you some lunch?”
My heart stopped for a moment, though I was certain that the offer wasn’t genuine.
“Nonsense!” I said. “I insist that I take you out somewhere—just you and me. Al is otherwise engaged.”
I held my breath.
“Oh, well,” she said. “Fine. I think I can put some outfit together.”
I let a long sigh out to one side of the mouthpiece, and I was sure that I could hear a similar sigh from the other end of the line. Both of us were relieved. None of the domestic arts was ever an interest of Eliza’s, because, she said to me once, “Not one of those activities gets you anywhere. After cleaning a house, you’re merely back to where you were before the place got dirty. After you’ve cooked, eaten, and cleaned up after Thursday’s meal, you can’t say that you are anywhere but where you were after you had cooked, eaten, and cleaned up after Wednesday’s meal.”
I suggested that we eat at the Manifest Destiny Diner, a favorite haunt of mine, which I like for its Wild West motif, its thick ’n’ juicy Vanishing Buffaloburgers, and its frosty mugs o’ beer, but she wanted to try Pussy’s, a new place downtown, where the sign that directs one to the toilets says Litter Boxes, a hamburger is called a Cat’s Meow, soup is served in heavy earthenware bowls that say CAT on the side, and the staff smiles relentlessly.
“Something from the bar?” asked a waitress, before we had quite settled in.
“Yes indeed,” said Eliza. “Drinks.”
The waitress smiled but did not laugh.
“Vodka and soda,” said Eliza. “No ice.”
“I’ll have a martini,” I said. “Straight up, with an olive.”
Al stepped out of character for a moment. “I’ll have the same,” she said, “but with a twist. Forget the vodka and soda.”
While we were having our drinks, Eliza read what I had written so far of the bathroom scene. She handed the manuscript back to me and asked me to order her another vodka and soda. She winked when she said it, so I ordered her another martini. She asked, “Well, Peter, what comes after this?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” I said.
The waitress brought Eliza’s drink, and I decided that I’d have another too.
“Well,” said Eliza, “of course, it’s up to you, but I think that, if I were you, I would not include anything explicitly erotic. I would think that it would be much—better—more effective—to just provide pretty much what you have—or maybe just a little more—some disconnected sensory details that would invite the reader to imagine an erotic—situation—taking either your part or mine—chacun à son goût, don’t you think? Just mention in a list—say—the smooth, wet, and slippery body of a boy of—ten, I think—a cotton blouse, damp with steam, clinging to the breasts of a voluptuous woman of thirty-four—her blond hair pinned up—a strand or two falling over her forehead—droplets of steam on the mirror and the white tiles—the tiny sound of popping bubbles—millions of tiny popping bubbles—hissing and crackling—like champagne or static—muffled by the clouds of steam—the light diffused by the steam—vague highlights on the boy’s smooth, wet skin—her hands in the warm water—the warm water enveloping the boy’s body—the slick, smooth skin along his thighs—his wet hand along her arm— the rounded tops of her quite lovely breasts when she leans over the edge of the tub—the firm pressure of the tub against her belly—her hand brushing against his smooth thigh—that sort of thing.”
THEN CAME THE THIRD PROBLEM: the flood. I had nearly finished the manuscript when nature interrupted my work and divided my attention. Most of the material was there, though a few things were still out of place and there were still some unanswered questions and some voices that I could not quite hear clearly. Rain began falling one night and continued to fall for eight days. Throughout that time, Babbington was nearly invisible: it was only a set of vague gray shapes beyond the rain. The water level in the cellar of the hotel rose steadily, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. We worked for hours each day bringing endangered tools, supplies, and mementos up to the safety of the ground floor. I was so concerned that my jars of nuts and bolts and the like would be disorganized that I insisted that we place things around the hotel in the same positions that they had occupied in the cellar. When the waters receded, I set up in the cellar every fan that we had, and in a couple of days the place was more or less back to normal. We carried everything back to the cellar and arranged it as it had been.
Then only the last and most perilous of the difficulties was still to be overcome: doubt. It was as if, while I was distracted by the flood, Fat Hank had moved into my workroom.
At about the time that I began work on “The Static of the Spheres,” Albertine brought home two large cartons of wood from which she planned to build a miniature of Small’s Hotel. She had in mind a true miniature, not just a representation of the exterior. She would build with miniature framing, tiny nails, sheathing, and clapboards. Best of all, she had bought a set of tiny, precise tools: a square, a plane, saws with teensy teeth, a mitre box, and so on.
She was at work on her small hotel throughout my work on this, and I suppose that the rhythms of her miniature construction—the tap-tap-tap of her little hammer, the back-and-forth whisper of her little saw—underlie some passages. But that is by the way; I want to say something about the materials themselves.
When she brought all the stuff home, we spread it out neatly on the tabletops in the dining room and spent quite a while just handling all of it and looking at it.
“You know, Al,” I said to her, “this is just like the moment when Guppa has all the parts of the radio lined up on his workbench. I have the same anticipatory feelings, the same mixture of excitement, eagerness—and fear. I sense, in all this cute stuff you brought home, what I should sense in the parts of the radio when they lie in ranks on Guppa’s workbench—the presence of a potential magnificence, something that I’ve found in the parts of other things before they’re assembled. The components might be—oh—a clutter of memories, boxes full of thin slabs of basswood and slender dowels, or ranks of vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, transformers, and the like. Sleeping in these things is the capacity to become a book, a dollhouse, or a shortwave receiver. One has the feeling that merely by gathering the parts, one has made a step toward realizing the end.
“‘Ah,’ one is tempted to say, ‘the pieces are all there. Now all I have to do is put them together.’
“But—” I said, dramatically, “—it may be better, sometimes, to leave the pieces as they are, unassembled, for the potential book crackles with wit, the shutters on the potential dollhouse are straight, and the signals picked up by the potential receiver are clear and strong, but the actual book is going to have its passages of half-baked philosophy and weepy sentimentality, some of the shutters on the actual dollhouse will hang at odd angles, and the receiver may bring in nothing but a rising and falling howl muffled by a thick hiss.”
Al laughed at me and told me to get upstairs and get to work, and I did.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
March 18, 1983
[to be continued on Tuesday, August 10, 2021]
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