The Tao of Humiliation Read online

  A thud echoed somewhere below, inside the house.

  I sprinted down the stairs to the first floor. By the time I was able to reassure myself that no one was in the house, the shock had done me some good. For a moment, I wasn’t living inside the imagined contours of Kulkins’s life.

  At four o’clock on my second day of research I slipped out behind the house. A haze hung over the bay. The wind picked up and sliced through stands of reeds. Soon my sandals were filled with silt. I wondered if the marsh had spread since Seyla lived on the property—and if she had walked upon soggy tussocks just as I was. I wound my way to the back porch, collapsed on a lawn chair and took off my slimy sandals. An echo vibrated. I swiveled. A shadow plunged at the screen door.

  There is an odd moment when we first meet a human being we’ve only encountered in a photograph. If the photograph is at all true to the likeness, the actual living person appears to peel off from her surroundings. And between the photograph and the person there’s a space that the mind makes, before the person becomes fully animate.

  So it was that I thought I was seeing Seyla Treat. The person before me looked like the image in a photograph in the Austin archive, delivered with Kulkins’s final effects. It was, obviously, Seyla’s daughter Flame—with her mother’s face, fleshed out, the deepest dimple above the left corner of her mouth. She gave me a startled look of incomprehension and apologized when she realized who I was. She said she hadn’t planned to return from Baltimore this week, but “here I am.” She said that twice.

  “I just needed to get a sense of the view,” I said, embarrassed for wandering around the property.

  “This place—” she said, shaking her head, her hair in spirals, wild as her mother’s. “Are you finding anything useful about my mother? Anything that you actually need?”

  “I’m not sure what I’ll find or how it will all work together.” Of course what I most hoped to locate were references to Kulkins, jottings about him, torn pages of journals about him, possibly a letter to or from him stuck among Seyla’s drafts. I’d given up hoping to find any of his own drafts in those boxes. Yes, I would look through Flame’s mother’s drafts respectfully, but with an eye only to what they might tell me about Kulkins and about Seyla’s relationship to him.

  It was sensible to be nervous about Seyla’s daughter, no matter how much I imagined I should pity her. Biography, I had stated in my grant application, is one of the most demanding arts. That sounded self-serving, yet I meant it. You can ask a certain sort of biographer what his subject ate for breakfast on New Year’s Day 1909 and get a detailed answer. The same biographer can’t tell you what he himself ate a day ago for lunch. Casey Armitage adopted a British accent after investing twelve years in writing about the exploits of a minor British poet. During his honeymoon, his new bride woke to witness Casey—the biographer of her grandfather—writing the family name into his forearm with a razor. Then, too, there was the biographer who showed up daily at the Berg, her laptop wielding increasingly complicated timelines, and who began signing her name in the register as William Butler Yeats. Which wasn’t even the figure she was working on.

  If biographers could lose their minds, the biographee’s executors and relatives were not infrequently the cause. Would Seyla’s daughter, the perversely named Flame, behave like those demonic executors who hoard the dead’s words, who relish their ability to deny the right to reprint or—just before publication—withdraw permission?

  “You’re not really interested in her much—as a person, are you?” Flame said. “Are you really going to write about my mother?”

  “I can’t be sure about the proportion of the biography that will be devoted to her.” As I spoke, my confidence was seeping away. How could I finish the biography even if I was able to answer the unanswerable questions that Kulkins’s silence posed? There were so many difficulties. Getting a publisher might require the sort of luck my life had never granted me. Kulkins, after all, wasn’t a celebrity, and his status as a literary figure had faded. And then there was the matter of Kulkins’s own personal life. The way he ditched so many women—no, he didn’t even ditch them. It would require planning to ditch a woman. A ditch takes time to dig. And now here with her eyes locked on mine was this woman who looked exactly like her mother. Who knows why her mother killed herself? Kulkins’s other emotional victims managed to survive.

  Flame turned away from me, but not before asking if I wanted to see the room she called her study. She did some writing herself, she said.

  Her study was at the end of the passage on the third floor, a room just to the left of the one that opened onto the balcony. The first thing I had trouble looking away from: scraps of yellow paper flowers circling an oval mirror and lifting in the breeze from an open window. A mirror reflected a ring of more flowers and gave the illusion of garlands upon garlands rippling through the room. Loose petals on a bureau drifted before settling.

  Clouds must have passed over the sun, and the room darkened. The flowers on the mirror deflated—and with them, dried casings and flimsy petals skidded across the floor. When I turned back, Flame was still holding open the door, her eyes wide and stunned-looking. At that instant she must have seen the room through my eyes, the musty interior, like the nest of a bird that gathered brightly-colored papery litter.

  I was ready to back out when a bookshelf emerged from the shadows. I knew the spines, glossy in plasticized bindings. All of Kulkins’s books. It occurred to me then that right there at the door, lifting her head, her eyes brimming with emotion, must be Kulkins’s ideal reader.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Seyla’s daughter said, “You’re not going to write the biography at all, are you? You’re just pretending that you’re going to write it.”

  “I’ll finish it,” I said.

  “No one will publish it. No one publishes anything that isn’t sensational. So you’ll have to find something sensational—or make up something sensational. A sensational discovery.”

  “That’s not my intention.”

  “There’s a beautiful poem by the poet David Ignatow,” she said. “Do you know it? It’s called ‘Rescue the Dead.’ It ends, You who are free, rescue the dead.’”

  “That’s beautiful. Really beautiful.”

  “I know. Did I tell you I expected someone taller?’

  “Flame, there’s something,” I said. “Please.”

  She followed me downstairs.

  The draft—lineated, unlike most of her work—was one I had passed over lightly. My fingers stuck to the paper as I lifted it from the box.

  Angel of fire,

  unchartered name,

  child of the heart,

  undimmed flame—

  It wasn’t a good poem—nothing Seyla would think of publishing. But it was an effort, direct, bald, that showed how nearly impossible it was for Seyla to find language to approach her love for her child.

  Flame sat at the dining room table, the scrap of paper between her hands as I left. I was certain that she would not look through the other papers—in dread of what she might find that could cancel the longed-for words in her hands.

  Flame and I didn’t see one another for two more days, although I heard her moving around on the floor above me whenever I let myself into the house. I was finding plenty of Seyla’s drafts but nothing that referred to Kulkins. Seyla didn’t appear to have adopted any of his styles of writing or his choices in her career. She was, after all, that strangest of writers: a prose poet, a maker of miniatures, of voices lodged in ambiguous parables.

  After another full day with Seyla’s papers I began to feel as if I were staring into a half-frozen river. The longer I stared, the more shadows appeared, and flashes of red, and smudges. And yet so far her drafts didn’t suggest depression so much as energy—a thawing, not a freezing. Seyla had given herself many voices, and her fluency read like health.

  I was sifting through more papers when my hand jumped. There it was: an enormous cross-out, thick,
canceling line after line of Seyla’s handwriting. A huge X, like a giant spider, sprawled across a sheet. As if what Seyla canceled on the page mirrored how she would cancel her own life.

  On that Thursday night, Seyla’s daughter asked if I would like to come with her when she drove to see the property that her father owned at the end of his life.

  I’m paraphrasing her question. I can’t remember exactly what she said, given my surprise. I guess it had always been at the back of my mind that Kulkins might be Flame’s father. I was on the porch, all set to return to my hotel, when she told me. Immediately I tried finding Kulkins in her face. We’ve all known families where the genes are piped through only one parent. All I could see when I looked at Flame was her mother.

  “How do you know he’s your father?” I asked. I was wondering how his paternity could be proved. His relations weren’t alive. Of course I’d never have the authority to exhume his body for DNA. Nothing I’d discovered in all my searches could validate her claim. Then, too, I might have to refine my timeline.

  Even as the calculations flashed through my mind I felt ashamed. If it was true that Kulkins was Flame’s father she had been abandoned twice over—once by her mother’s suicide and next by her father’s neglect and refusal to claim her. Did claiming Kulkins as her father serve some deep need of her own?

  All at once I felt as transparent as a glass anatomical model. As if Flame could watch my mind making its tallies, as if my mind must be cold and inhuman. For the first time—with the appearance of one small pinched line between her eyes—I realized the truth: she hated me.

  In that instant while standing with her on the porch I hated her too—even though we had something in common, although I was far luckier than she was. I had intuited that she also wanted to escape her life. Wanted glamour and risk, even if vicariously. My own most stable memories: my mother and I settling down to dinner before the television night after night throughout my childhood, while my mother was drawn deeper into depression. As if even while we sat there staring at the television with chicken pot pies on our TV trays we were both sinking up to our knees in mud. By the time I was thirteen I learned to smile often—to reassure my mother that I wasn’t being harmed by her sadness. Smiling was my small useless weapon. What did I do for my own escape? I read. In a sense, given that I had never known who my father was, Kulkins fathered me from the moment, at thirteen, when I discovered his novels and told myself: In this moment, reading, I am changing my life. His novels let me know that adulthood, when I reached it, didn’t need to be a suckhole for misery. And so I read everything by Kulkins I could find. His literary mysteries borrowed heavily from fairy tales, but with sex, and the sex was gummy and wolfish and weirder than any that appeared humanly possible. Eventually I went on to graduate school and composed a dissertation on “novels of detection and the culture of paranoia.” Afterwards, I returned to Kulkins’s fiction like a woman rescued from an uninhabited island by a tramp steamer and delivered to a husband who never, despite the intervening years, believed she was dead. That is, I returned to Kulkins as if he were the ever-faithful one. Which, given his record with women, was ironic.

  By the time I finished these thoughts, Flame had ducked back into the house without answering my question. I vowed that I would learn more—gradually, if she ever began to trust me enough to tell me how she knew who her father was.

  That night I conducted a search through twelve of Kulkins’s short stories that I had scanned and entered into my laptop last year. Even in that limited sample, forty-seven instances of the word flame or close cognates emerged (fire, scorch—fire usually part of a compound). Thirty-nine of those appeared between 1974–1977, from the year of Flame’s birth until the end of Kulkins’s writing life.

  The next day Flame and I drove to the farm where Malcolm Alfred Kulkins spent his last years. The new owners had come from India only five months earlier. They didn’t begrudge us for asking to look around. The woman at the house that afternoon explained that she and her husband bought the property in part because they liked the idea that a writer spent time there. “The atmosphere is very good,” she said. She kept her eyes away from Flame and me. Her little girl, however, constantly tugged at Flame’s hand before at last disappearing inside the house. Within minutes the child came out wearing a frothy white dress and white patent leather shoes.

  The woman allowed her daughter to show us the path that led to the apple orchard. The little girl danced ahead of us, sending up dust devils in the lane. Again and again she stole backward glances, her hair fanning out prettily in a cloud.

  The orchard was overwhelmed with thistles and high grass. Still, the trees had to be bearing. Apple blossoms drifted through the air. We were continually brushing them from our hair. To give up writing, to stop—even struggling, burdened with doubts: I couldn’t imagine the prospect for Kulkins.

  We were in the heart of the orchard when, dancing with happiness in her shiny shoes, the little girl climbed a boulder. The rock was hard up against the trunk of an apple tree, where no rock should be, I thought—as did Flame. That’s where we pushed, working to shove the boulder aside, to see what might be there, what could possibly be there, what was hidden and what remained, while the child laughed at such hopeful strangers.

  I called it a miracle when we uncovered the safety deposit box. It wasn’t even locked. Inside: multiple drafts. Notes, undated. I didn’t recognize any of the sentences, and so it might be late work—what Kulkins had written during those years when everyone assumed he faded into silence. After I caught my breath I made myself slow down enough to read a poem. Though it didn’t begin as a poem. It started with what looked like rough notes for an essay:

  The writer’s lack of control, failure of concentration. The genie that goes to sleep no matter how many times you shake the bottle. Hatred of the writer: from other writers, from aspiring writers, from the writer toward the writer: hatred of the writer for the writing self.

  Hatred of the writer for his human muse, his desire to suffocate her talents—should his muse have gifts of her own.

  Immediately thereafter appeared the poem, with lines crossed out and reworked. It was signed by Kulkins. I had often thought that in his last years he might have turned to poetry, and here was my proof:

  Fears—Not the Worst, Not the Worst, Not the Worst

  To be alone

  without money or memory.

  To be inside a small love

  when a greater love waits.

  To be silent in the small love.

  To hear someone beaten on the other side of a wall

  and to be unable to

  help or to

  call for help.

  To be able to walk

  but not without being followed,

  to be spat upon,

  to return to childhood,

  to write what no one

  will read.

  The air swirled with more apple blossoms, blossoms that seemed as alive as moths. We were in the orchard for so long that the little girl grew bored and headed back up the lane to her mother.

  A flame of uneasiness shuddered at the back of my mind. What was causing this sensation? The fact that the soil around the buried box was loose and that we were able to reach the box quickly? The obvious fact that the box itself didn’t look worn enough to have been buried long? Was it the way the little girl had smiled up into Flame’s face?

  Even more to the point: the writing was signed—and while the signature was a halfway decent representative of Kulkins’s, otherwise the handwriting slashed across the typescript was not his, nor was the style of cross-outs. I had labored too long over his drafts in Austin not to know what they should look like.

  Flame’s eyes were moist and huge when I stood up.

  “You wrote this,” I said.

  She flew from me, disappearing up the lane, this ghost of ambition’s intrigues and forgeries. Enough evidence, I believe, for me to take her at her word: for whatever it’s worth, to
call her her father’s daughter.

  I didn’t follow her right away. She couldn’t just leave me there. I expected that when I walked back up the lane she would be sitting behind the wheel of her car, waiting for me. And so I took my time in the orchard where her father must have wandered, where he must have studied the apple trees, gnarled and stunted in the falling light, how with each gust of wind they shed the most beautiful parts of themselves.

  The Tao of Humiliation

  The guy with stringy hair was staring, which made Everett even more nervous, as if something was going on under the table with that guy. Was the guy nuzzling something on his lap—a field mouse? Or was it something else—a genital piercing? “I’ve been around,” the nervous-making guy said, without provocation. “It’s important to get around.” His hair fell in two thin fronds from a center part. His name was Barry.

  “How do you afford it?” a deep voice asked from the other end of the table. The guy who asked was Lucas, some sort of retired businessman who spent half his life in Florida, the cracks around his eyes like sunrays in a child’s drawing.

  “I come from a generous family,” Barry said, pushing back strings of his hair. “They believe in travel.” With that, he stood, and Everett realized what the problem was. Barry was wearing a kilt.

  Kilts. Why should kilts be a problem? Everett had watched Entertainment Tonight and saw an old clip of Sean Connery in a kilt, which looked okay. But this guy in a kilt, this guy Barry—it was like a crime against a culture. Like he tore the kilt off some giant school girl.

  When Barry sat back down, Lucas said, “I had the cancer.” He spread his hands and looked around the table until he had the other men’s attention. “I’m all right,” he said, “despite the cancer.”

  When no one responded, Everett said, “That must have been hard.” His voice sounded to himself as if something was wrong with his teeth.