Self-Defense Read online

  “What about your family?” I said.

  “My family is basically Peter, whom you met. He’s one year older than me and we’re close. His nickname’s Puck—someone gave it to him when he was a little boy because he was such an imp.”

  “Is he your only sib?”

  “My only full sib. There’s a half brother who lives up in San Francisco, but I have no contact with him. He had a sister who died several years ago.” Pause. “All my grandparents and uncles and aunts are deceased. My mother passed away right after I was born.”

  Young, I thought, to be so surrounded by death. “What about your dad?”

  She looked down quickly, as if searching for a lost contact lens. Her legs were flat on the floor, her torso twisting away from me, so that the fabric of her blouse tightened around her narrow waist.

  “I was hoping we could avoid this,” she said softly. “And not because of the dream.”

  Wheeling around. The intense stare Milo’d seen in the courtroom.

  “If you don’t want to talk about him, you don’t have to.”

  “It’s not a matter of that. Bringing him into it always changes things.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of who he is.”

  She gazed up at the ceiling and smiled.

  “Your line,” she said, extending one hand theatrically.

  “Who is he?”

  She gave a small laugh.

  “Morris Bayard Lowell.” Enunciating.

  Another laugh, totally cheerless.

  “Buck Lowell.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  I’d heard of M. Bayard Lowell the way I’d heard of Hemingway and Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas.

  When I was in high school, some of his early prose and verse were in the textbooks. I’d never thought much of his paint-splotched abstract canvases, but I knew they hung in museums.

  Published in his teens, exhibited in his twenties, the postwar enfant terrible turned Grand Old Man of Letters.

  But it had been years since I’d heard anything about him.

  “Shocked?” said Lucy, looking grim but satisfied.

  “I see what you mean about things changing. But the only relevance he has to me is his role as your father.”

  She laughed. “His role? Roll in the hay is about it, Dr. Delaware. The grand moment of conception. Old Buck’s a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy. He cut out on Mother when I was a few weeks old and never returned.”

  She smoothed her bangs and sat up straighter.

  “So how come I’m dreaming about him, right?”

  “It’s not that unusual. An absent parent can be a strong presence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anger, curiosity. Sometimes fantasies develop.”

  “Fantasies about him? Like going to the Pulitzer ceremony on his arm? No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t around enough to be relevant.”

  “But when he comes into the picture, things change.”

  “Who he is changes things. It’s like being the President’s kid. Or Frank Sinatra’s. People stop perceiving you as who you are and start seeing you in relationship to him. And they get shocked—just like you did—to find out the Great Man spawned someone so crashingly ordinary.”

  “I—”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, waving a hand. “I love being ordinary: my ordinary job, my ordinary car, my ordinary apartment and bills and tax returns and washing dishes and taking out the garbage. Ordinary is heaven for me, Dr. Delaware, because when I was growing up nothing was routine.”

  “Your mother died right after you were born?”

  “I was a couple of months old.”

  “Who raised you?”

  “Her older sister, my Aunt Kate. She was just a kid herself, new Barnard grad, living in Greenwich Village. I don’t remember too much about it other than her taking Puck and me to lots of restaurants. Then she got married to Walter Lazar—the author? He was a reporter back then. Kate divorced him after a year and went back to school. Anthropology—she studied with Margaret Mead and started going on expeditions to New Guinea. That meant boarding school for Puck and me, and that’s where we stayed all through high school.”

  “Together?”

  “No, he was sent to prep academies, and I went to girls’ schools.”

  “It must have been tough, being separated.”

  “We were used to being shifted around.”

  “What about the half siblings you mentioned?”

  “Ken and Jo? They lived with their mother, in San Francisco. Like I said, there’s no contact at all.”

  “Where was your father all this time?”

  “Being famous.”

  “Did he support you financially?”

  “Oh, sure, the checks kept coming, but for him that was no big deal, he’s rich from his mother’s side. The bills were paid through his bank, and my living expenses were sent to the school and doled out by the headmistress—very organized for an artiste, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He never came to visit?”

  She shook her head. “Not once. Two or three times a year he’d call, on the way to some conference or art show.”

  She pulled something out of her eyelashes.

  “I’d get a message to come to the school office and some secretary would hand me the phone, awestruck. I’d brace myself, say hello, and this thunderous voice would come booming through. “Hello, girl. Eating freshly blooded moose meat for breakfast? Getting your corpuscles moving?’ Witty, huh? Like one of his stupid macho hunting stories. A summary of what he was doing, then good-bye. I don’t think I spoke twenty words in all those years.”

  She turned to me.

  “When I was fourteen, I finally decided I’d had enough and got my roommate to tell him I was out of the dorm. He never called again. All you get with a Great Man is one chance.”

  She tried to smile, lips working at it, struggling to form the shape. Finally, she managed to force the corners upward.

  “It’s no big deal, Dr. Delaware. Mother died when I was so young I never really knew what it was like to lose her. And he was . . . nothing. Like I said, lots of people have it worse.”

  “This issue of being ordinary—”

  “I really do like it. Not a shred of talent, same with Puck. That’s probably why he has nothing to do with us. Living reminders that he’s produced mediocrity. He probably wishes we’d all disappear. Poor Jo obliged.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Climbed a mountain in Nepal and never came down. His wives oblige him, too. Three out of four are dead.”

  “Your mother must have been very young when she died.”

  “Twenty-one. She got the flu and went into some sort of toxic shock.”

  “So she was only twenty when she married him?”

  “Just barely. He was forty-six. She was a Barnard girl, too, a sophomore. They met because she was in charge of bringing speakers to campus, and she invited him. Three months later she dropped out, he took her to Paris, and they got married. Puck was born there.”

  “When did they get divorced?”

  “They didn’t. Right after I was born, he went back to France. It wasn’t long after when she died. The doctors called him, but he never came to the phone. Two weeks after the funeral, a postcard arrived at Aunt Kate’s, along with a check.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Puck. He heard it from Aunt Kate—he went out to visit her in New Zealand after he finished college.”

  “Ken and Jo are older than you and Puck?”

  “Yes. Their mother was his second wife, Mother was his third. The first was ThÉrÈse Vainquer—the French poet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Apparently she was pretty hot in postwar Paris, hanging around with Gertrude Stein and that bunch. She left him for a Spanish bullfighter and was killed in a car crash soon after. Next came Emma, Ken and Jo’s mom. She was an artist, not very successful. She died aroun
d fifteen or sixteen years ago—breast cancer, I think. He left her for my mom, Isabelle Frehling. His fourth wife was Jane something or other, an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They met because the museum had a bunch of his paintings stored in their basement and he wanted them exhibited in order to revive his painting career—it’s pretty dead, you know. So is his writing career. Anyway, he dumped her after about a year and hasn’t married since. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s got another sweet young thing right now. Illusion of immortality.”

  She crossed her legs and held one knee with both hands.

  Tossing out details about a man who supposedly had no role in her life.

  She read my mind. “I know, I know, it sounds as if I cared enough to find all this out, but I got it from Puck. A few years ago, he was into this discover-your-roots thing. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I couldn’t care less.”

  Folding her arms across her chest.

  “So,” I said, “at least we know the log cabin wasn’t somewhere you’ve actually been. At least not with your father.”

  “Call him Buck, please. Mr. Macho, the Great Man, whatever, anything but that.”

  Touching her stomach.

  Remembering the ulcer she’d had before college, I said, “Where did you live the summer after you graduated from high school?”

  She hesitated for a second. “I volunteered at a Head Start center in Boston.”

  “Was it difficult?”

  “No. I loved teaching. This was in Roxbury, little ghetto kids who really responded. You could see the effects after one summer.”

  “Did you ever consider a teaching career?”

  “I tossed it around, but after all those years in school—growing up in schools—I just wasn’t ready for another classroom. I guess I might have eventually done it, but the bookkeeping thing came up and I just rolled with the flow.”

  I thought of the isolation that had been her childhood. Milo had talked about tough times strengthening her—a mugging of sorts. But maybe it was nothing specific, just an accumulation of loneliness.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Now do you understand my dream?”

  “Not in the least.”

  She looked at me and laughed. “Well, that’s straight out.”

  “Better no answer than a wrong one.”

  “True, true.” Laughing some more, but her hands were tense and restless and she tapped her feet.

  “I guess I’m ticked off,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Him in my dreams. It’s an . . . invasion. Why now?”

  “Maybe you’re ready, now, to deal with your anger toward him.”

  “Maybe,” she said doubtfully.

  “That doesn’t feel right?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t think I’m angry at him. He’s too irrelevant to get angry at.”

  Anger had stiffened her voice. I said, “The girl in the dream, how old is she?”

  “Nineteen or twenty, I guess.”

  “About your mother’s age when she married him.”

  Her eyes widened. “So you think I’m dreaming about his violation of Mother? But Mother was blond and this girl has dark hair.”

  “Dreams aren’t bound by reality.”

  She thought for a while. “I suppose it could be that. Or something else symbolic—the young chicks he always chased—but I really don’t think I’d dream about his girlfriends. Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I push you for interpretations and then keep shooting them down.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “It’s your dream.”

  “Yes—only I wish it wasn’t. Any idea when I’ll get rid of it?”

  “I don’t know, Lucy. The more I know about you, the better answer I can give you.”

  “Does that mean I have to keep talking about my past?”

  “It would help, but don’t make yourself uncomfortable.”

  “Do I need to talk about him?”

  “Not until you’re ready.”

  “What if I’m never ready?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “But you think it would be useful.”

  “He was in the dream, Lucy.”

  She started to crack a knuckle and stopped herself.

  “This is getting tough,” she said. “Maybe I should call the psychic buddies.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  After she was gone, I thought about the dream.

  Somnambulism. Bedwetting.

  Fragmented sleep patterns were often displayed as multiple symptoms—persistent nightmares, insomnia, even narcolepsy. But the sudden onset of her symptoms implied a reaction to some kind of stress: the trial material or something the trial had evoked.

  Her allusion to an incubus was interesting.

  Sexual intrusion.

  Daddy abducting a maiden. Grinding noises.

  A Freudian would have loved it: unresolved erotic feelings toward the abandoning parent coming back to haunt her.

  Feelings awakened because the trial had battered her defenses.

  She was right about one thing: This father was different.

  And relevant.

  I drove down toward the city, taking the coast highway to Sunset and heading east to the University campus.

  At the Research Library, I looked up M. Bayard Lowell in the computer index. Page after page of citations beginning in 1939—the year he’d published his landmark first novel, The Morning Cry—and encompassing his other novels, collections of poems, and art exhibitions.

  Covering all of it would take a semester. I decided to start with the time period that corresponded to Lucy’s dream, roughly twenty-two years ago.

  The first reference was a book of poems entitled Command: Shed the Light, published on New Year’s Day. The rest were reviews. I climbed up to the stacks and began my refresher course in American Lit.

  In the poetry shelves, I found the book, a thin gray-jacketed volume published by one of the prestige New York houses. The circulation slip showed it hadn’t been checked out in three years. I went to the periodicals section and lugged volume after volume of bound magazines to an empty carrel. When my arms grew sore, I sat down to read.

  Command: Shed the Light turned out to be Lowell’s first book in ten years, its predecessor an anthology of previously published short stories. The New Year’s release date was also Lowell’s fiftieth birthday. The book had attracted a lot of attention: six-figure advance, main selection by one of the book clubs, foreign rights sold in twenty-three countries, even a film option by an independent production company in Hollywood, which seemed odd for poetry.

  Then came the critics. One major newspaper called the work “self-consciously gloomy and stunningly amateurish and, this writer suspects, a calculated effort on the part of Mr. Lowell to snare the youth market.” Another, describing Lowell’s career as “glorious, lusty, and historically indelible,” gave him credit for taking risks but labeled his verse “only very occasionally pungent, more frequently vapid and sickening, morose and incoherent. Glory has yielded to vainglory.”

  Lots more in that key, with one exception: A Columbia University doctoral student named Denton Mellors, writing in the Manhattan Book Review, rhapsodized “darkly enchanting, rich with lyric texture.”

  From what I could tell, Lowell hadn’t reacted to the debacle publicly. A bottom-of-the-page paragraph in the January twenty-fourth Publishers Journal noted that sales of the book were “significantly below expectations.” Similar articles appeared in other magazines, ruminating on the death of contemporary poetry and speculating as to where M. Bayard Lowell had gone wrong.

  In March, the Manhattan Book Review noted that Lowell was rumored to have left the country, destination unknown. In June, a cheeky British glossy reported his presence in a small village in the Cotswolds.

  Having confirmed that the sweatered-and-capped personage meandering among the sheep was indeed the once-touted A
merican, we tried to approach but were accosted by two rather formidable mastiffs who showed no interest in our bangers-and-chips and convinced us by dint of grease-and-growl to beat a hasty retreat. What has happened, we wonder, to Mr. Lowell’s once insatiable Yankish appetite for attention? Ah, fleeting fame!

  Other foreign sightings followed throughout that summer: Italy, Greece, Morocco, Japan. Then, in September, the Los Angeles Times Book Review announced that “Pulitzer prize-winning author M. Bayard Lowell” would be relocating to Southern California and contributing occasional essays to the supplement. In December, the Hot Property column in the Times Real Estate section reported that Lowell had just closed escrow on fifty acres in Topanga Canyon.

  Sources say it is a heavily wooded, rustic campsite in need of repair. Last utilized as a nudist colony, it is off the beaten track and seems perfect for Lowell’s new Salingeresque identity. Or maybe the author-cum-artist is simply traveling West for the weather.

  May: Lowell attended a PEN benefit for political prisoners, a “star-studded gala” at the Malibu home of Curtis App, a film producer. Two more westside parties in April, one in Beverly Hills, one in Pacific Palisades. Lowell, newly bearded and wearing a blue denim suit, was spotted talking to the current Playmate of the Month. When approached by a reporter, he walked away.

  In June, he delivered a keynote speech at a literacy fund-raiser where he announced the creation of an artists’ and writers’ retreat on his Topanga land.

  “It will be a sanctum,” he said, “and it will be called Sanctum. A blank palette upon which the gifted human will be free to struggle, squiggle, squirt, splotch, deviate, divert, digress, dig in the dirt, and howsoever indulge the Great Id. Art pushes through the hymen of banality only when the nerves are allowed to twang unfettered. Those in the know, know that the true luxuries are those of synapse and spark.”

  A September piece in the L.A. Times entertainment section reported that a grant from film producer App was financing construction of new lodgings at Sanctum. The architect: a twenty-four-year-old Japanese-American prodigy named Claude Hiroshima, whose last project had been the refurbishment of all the lavatories in a Madrid hotel.