The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [16]
Women had always appeared fair to my eyes. Yes, college girls, and even the high-school girls I once taught. But much of that evaporated when I became a father to my own little girl. Now every woman looked like somebody’s daughter. And after I lost her, they all began to look like my own daughter—to look like Elsie, inhabiting her years, filled with my daughter’s unlived life, Elsie seeking something out of their eyes.
Curious to say, her name wasn’t Elizabeth, or anything else to do with Elsie. She was Huntley, a name arguably a lot nicer, but as a baby she had a stuffed animal—these days they call them “sleeping animals”—named Elsie by the manufacturers, and labeled Elsie across her bearish belly. In that world, in the baby’s crib, in that epoch, identities flowed back and forth. There weren’t even fantasies then—all was fantasy. Through a kind of enchantment the child Huntley appropriated Elsie the bear’s name, and kept it. The bear kept it, too. Everybody ended up Elsie, all the sleeping animals, also Anne. And for a little while even I was Elsie.
Everything became Elsie, and in a manner of speaking everything still is. In losing Anne I’d lost the woman in my life. But in losing Elsie, I’d lost all of us.
“Mike?” It was J.J., standing in front of the Italian place looking right and left and pulling on a pair of gloves. “He arrives!” he said to me. I went carefully down the slick steps.
Now, in this season of return, I felt myself becoming less and less Elsie and more and more Mike Reed. Less the man who’d lost his family, and more just somebody who didn’t happen to have one.
“It’s funny,” J.J. said, the sleet landing and melting on his shoulders, “Trevor Watt was a teacher of mine, my most important teacher. For a while he was the most important person in my life. I mean, you know, I pored over every nuance. Do you know how it can be with a teacher, and you’re young, you’ve got nothing yet, only what he confers on you? Every word he said was gold. Then suddenly I hated him. He betrayed all my worship. He didn’t mean to. He just turned out to be human. And I burned with hatred for the guy. I wanted him dead. And when those people tonight mentioned his name, and now he is dead…I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought of him since…I couldn’t even tell you. It’s been years.”
When J.J. dropped me at my house, I didn’t invite him inside. I made no excuse, though he actually got out and walked me to the door. We stood listening to the noise of a party across the street, students, surely, exploding after their midterms: a repeatedly banging screen door, and laughter, and the thump, thump, thump of their music.
J.J. jammed his gloved hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and said, “Ah! Youth.”
A white car, one from the early seventies, a big old Moby Dick of an automobile, whizzed around the corner onto our block, blew a front tire with a cheerful plopping noise, and went into a pirouette that ended with the rear wheels on the sidewalk, where they spun angrily until they found a purchase and the vehicle shot into the street again, then stalled. Apparently satisfied with this as a final position, as a parking place, very nearly in the middle of this dead-end street, two young men got out with deliberate movements and stumbled toward the house where the others laughed.
J.J. said, “Hey—fellas—excuse me—”
They wandered on inside, and he shouted louder, “Hey!” and then screamed, “HEY—” and stopped himself.
For a few seconds we were silent. The noise of the party went on unabated. “I wouldn’t want to repeat my younger days,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.
“Ah, well,” he said. He smiled. In the light of streetlamps tears shone in his eyes. “I’m off,” he said. “Thanks for the company.”
“Any time. Really.” I thought it very possible we’d see more of each other, two single men.
The ticking sound of the frozen rain stopped an hour or so after it started. The party down the block careened on through the night. For better than two years now this