The point is that Jameson, despite his erratic and irresponsible behavior, was an important and valued member of the household. We had his inspiration to thank for more than one of the customs that made living among us such a pleasure, and it was by the offices of some of his more restrained propagandistic prose that we were able to disabuse Trivingdale's head honchos of any notions they might have had of our perfidy or the threat we posed to their way of life. The fact was that Jameson was a pleasure to be around when he was coherent. He had come, we supposed, from a very cultured background, one from which he had been spilled by some tragic rupture we never managed to learn anything about. We knew he had grown up privileged somewhere in Virginia and that, at 18, he had moved as far away from home as possible to earn a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso. And it was in those scorched borderlands that he developed his radically solipsist worldview--this was a man who went through the tired trope of taking us for figments, more than once--as well as his taste for running crazy on hallucinogens. When shaken by some particularly violent affront to his body and the commonsensical proscriptions for its care he'd confessed to nearly having lost his life while wandering the bone-littered gullies and draws just beyond the city limit. That and precious little more was what we knew.
"He wasn't one for the ladies, at least not in the raunchy and obsessive way that men of 25 tend to be, or if he was he managed to conduct his business elsewhere, in Chinatown, under cloak of night, sub rosa. He wasn't overly close to any of the other guys in the house either. That was Jameson. He was close to Agatha, actually, but whatever they had between them was inscrutable, and probably chaste. They spent a great deal of time together when Jameson wasn't on one of his triploafs--sounds like a kind of turd, doesn't it--time that they seemed to pass mostly in silence. Call it a spiritual connection. Anyhow--onto Agatha.
"You have time, right? I'm not boring you going on like this am I?"
I told my interlocutor that as an unemployed and middle-aged man whose wife and children avowedly thought very little of him, I had nothing but time on my hands and would be please to stay at the bar and hear him out until closing. Besides, I said, it was only eight o'clock. We ordered another drink and observed a solemn toast before he went on.
"Agatha, ah--what is this shit? Are you Mickey Finning my drink with Early Times again, barman? But Agatha. Agatha. Like I said, she was Canadian. From some maritime province. I'd say she was pretty, but compared to Vanessa she was as plain as the nose on your face. She also preferred drab drapes of clothing and little to no hair care, prefiguring all the low-effort girls you see running around these days. I even half suspected that she applied makeup in reverse, so to speak, in an effort to plane out her features altogether. But she was a hell of a cook. Enthusiastic, bold, tireless. You could count the days of the week by the new recipes she thought up. Jameson always said the most subversive thing about our household was the way we ate--never a processed ingredient, never a single piece of produced trucked across state lines. I don't know how she managed. I mean this was in the dead years, after the death of farming and before food's resurrection as a luxury for the incredible hordes of faggots who pay out the nose for it. Agatha also managed to used the needs of the kitchen to direct Vanessa's behavior and generally defuse tension whenever her coquetry threatened to destabilize the goodwill that prevailed among the men of the house. I'm not sure if it was deliberately or by instinct, but it worked out quite well on the ground. After a meeting or activity in which attention had generally shifted onto Vanessa to the detriment of domestic harmony, there would always be something Agatha needed done in the garden in order to prevent the meal she was cooking from derailing into a catastrophe: A new planting, a new clipping, always snipped, shorn or peeled just so. As if by silent accord, Vanessa always allowed herself to be sluiced off, and the pressure was relieved. A woman is at her most dangerous when unchecked by duty and allegiance to other women, and Agatha recognized this better than anyone. I remember once Uncle Theo was over with an attorney friend of his who took a shine to Vanessa and started asking her all kinds of questions about why she preferred to live in a hippie encampment, as he put it, when she could easily affiliate herself with a man of means, a man of substance, a man of class, in his word, and live well with him. Vanessa, far from being put off, entertained his queries with a simpering charm, delighting in the hackles she felt rising on the necks of the other men around her. Kamill, who'd had his eye on Vanessa but had yet to make any definitive moves, was just about to get into it with the man when Agatha wheeled about from her position at the stove and sent Vanessa into the garden with a decisive thrust from her ladle. Get me a little bit of everything, she'd said. And take your time. "Agatha's family owned an amazing summer place on the Nova Scotia coast. I forget exactly where, but it involved a long ferry passage and a great deal of driving. We used to go as often as we could. It was a cabin more or less wedged into the side of a cliff overlooking the wide ocean seething below. It was accessible only by foot, using a path I think even goats would have had trouble negotiating. The ocean view was framed by a tiny garden grafted with great care onto two or three terraces that communicated by ladders, each no larger than a jail cell. One of those projects whose result is far outweighed by the ponderous body of effort that went into achieving it, and which for me carry a great wisdom. A futile wisdom, but a great one in spite or even because of the futility. The last terrace was lined by a low rock wall, but it wasn't enough to shore you up in case of a blunder, and a single misstep would assure you a dashing to death on the boulders wreathed faintly in spume nearly 500 feet below. There was no electricity. Coal and wood could be lowered from above using a bucket and pulley system, but the rope didn't have a catch and you had to be very careful. I'm telling you--" my interlocutor's eye was welling with sentiment "--there was nothing like it. Bernal and I used to stand on the bottom terrace throwing rocks and clods down onto the breakers and the boulders to see who could hit what first, navigating our projectiles through those storied sea buffets as we drank beer out of green or gray or blue cans to suit our mood. There's a lot to the color of a beer can, my friend. Most of the time the spray made it impossible to see where the rocks had hit, meaning that we would have debates. Of course Bernal was from Mexico, where they don't have much of a throwing or aiming culture, so if he hit what he was aiming for it was strictly by chance, which, as I often argued, invalidated the result. In such cases, in common with police shootings, it is the intent that counts, even the probably intent, liberally interpreted.
"And then there were the nights. Nights poured into the eye from a pure molten blackness textured by sound. Often I'd lay awake half the night listening. The cabin's site on the cliff, not just on the cliff but in it, halfway down and in it, meant that when the wind was blowing to sea there would be nothing to hear at all but our own snores and shifts. But when the wind turned, our little niche in the cliff became an amphitheater, amplifying every burble and churn of water on rock until I felt compelled to get up hold my light out into the nothingness to make sure we weren't sliding into the sea or succumbing to a tidal wave. Sometimes as I stood there a great ship's horn would bellow somewhere out at sea and play along the cliff, rebounding and redounding until I thought it might finally shake the cabin loose from its moorings after all. Or me. To my knees. But really it was the times of seaward wind and total silence that scared me the most, especially if the night was moonless. And fragranceless. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, smelling nothing, but knowing full well that my feet had but poor purchase halfway up a towering granite cliff overlooking the cold and endless waters, not to mention that awareness of the pitiless heavens yawning above and beyond that cloud blanket, in all their boundlessness--that is a feeling, my friend. Not a comfortable one, but a vital one.
"I think we need constant evidence of the world and our place in it to know not only where we stand, but even for reassurance in the very basic matter of where we begin, where we end as the concepts of space and time tumble around and play havoc on our minds. Do you see what I mean? Imagine--on a night like that, to be a mote dissolved in the infinitude of the universe and without any sound to give it texture so that the world shrinks down to you or you expand to fit the whole of the world--such nothingness is too much to bear, don't you think?"
I said I thought I understood what he was getting at and that it reminded me of the related sensation of swimming out to sea, into blue water, and then turning about and looking up at the sky and wondering what would the sensation be like, and how long would it last, if the world were to explode.
"Precisely. So that was Agatha. I guess I knew more about her little hideaway than I did about her. That leaves two more of the members of the household. Nelson and Natalie. How to give you an idea of Nelson? Unlike the rest of us, Nelson never went to college. He also knew more about everything than the rest of us combined. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that while he did know more than the rest of us combined about almost anything, he gave the impression of being a repository of knowledge without equal since the time of J.S. Mill--not because he faked it, but because of the breathtaking pace of his appetite for the reiteration and citation of knowledge. Without ever having taken a college course, and also without adopting the annoying autodidact's habit of always lugging around books--in fact, I never once remember seeing him read one, it must have been something he did in his room, under cloak of night, sub rosa. Maybe even in Chinatown. Nelson knew everything about ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the Empire, Islam, the Mongols, Scholasticism, the Monophysite heresy, the dialectic of enlightenment, the role of the Blackstone River Valley in the American industrial revolution, the internal combustion engine, western states' water policy, the evolution of the game of football and the origins of the revolutionary forward pass, the various cuts of men's suits through the decades and centuries, the shadowy dealings and moral failings of an wide array of nationally prominent politicians, the essential anatomical measurements, both estimated and confirmed, of the leading actresses of the day, the morphology of beer brewing on the eastern seaboard, the Soviets' 5-year plans down to their excruciating details, etc., etc. He had a remarkable motley mind. But if you asked him to do something for you, and here's the catch, somehow it would find its way to a crack in the side or bottom of that same mind and drain right out.
"His political leanings were probably more puritan-libertarian than hippie, so much so that I often wondered what the fuck he was doing with us. To see him--he always used to wear these suits that he'd lint-roll in the mornings--he was the type of guy you might cast as a policy aide in the Nixon administration or as a smooth-talking adman. And he could have been those things if he'd wanted to. But he didn't seem to want anything. Was that a problem? I don't know. He constantly spouted off ideas for pranks we could pull on the city council or the school board or some of the war-profiteering executives who lived in Trivingdale. He had his eye on various pieces of land we could buy and improve in the forests of western New England and detailed plans for what crops and crafts to raise and ply, but whatever his surfeit of brainpower and inventiveness and rhetoric, it was offset by his profound lack of elbow grease and staying power when push came to shove. Even of the mental kind. Nelson generated his share of friction too, of course. He was intolerant of anything less than the keenest intelligence and had a hard time suppressing his disdain for mediocre minds, especially when talking to women. Provoked, Vanessa once accused him of being a stooge for the FBI and tried to lead a purge to have him kicked out of the household. I think he was on a kind of unofficial probation in the household when the shit hit the fan. But in the end he was one of us, if for no other reason than that he wanted nothing more than to be what he was, and over the year or two that he spent with us he managed to develop enough tact at least to get by and take the roughest edges out of the friction he caused. He was also quite useful to us as a proxy in whatever dealings we had with the city and the police. He wore a pressed suit at all times, he spoke in the language of the hereditary elite, and knew how to navigate his way around bureaucracies almost by instinct. Combined with Uncle Ted's status and influence, Nelson's rapport with power made us feel relatively safe in our overall defiance of it.
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