My problems exceed those of Thang Phong. But not by much. I am freshly divorced and at the age (a preserved fifty-plus) that forces young women to gauge their readiness to take on a man as old as their fathers, with a fathery set of smells. The less imaginative of them, which is nearly all of them, regard a fifty-year-old man’s owning a red sports car a midlife crisis, a phrase of which they are most fond. The intractability of young women is not my real problem; it is but the problem I like to think about. The real problem is that I have no ambition or desire for anything at all — not for the women, not for work, not for barbecuing, not for life. If I have a problem, it is that I have no problem.
I have made Thang Phong also have, strangely, no problem where he should have a huge problem. He reached toward Mrs. Wallenstein more for balance than to strike her, which he did only inadvertently, as was the formation of the snake strike inadvertent (for the second time in the day, for the second time in thirty years). He dressed neatly, refolding the towel he lightly used, and left Mrs. Thorsen where she lay asphyxiated on the mauve polyester bath mat that also matched the toilet upholstery and the towels. He was remorseful to see her indisposed like that but not overcome by grief or anxiety. Two people had tried to put germs on him within a space of about twenty minutes and both of them had fallen down. Mrs. Terrebone had been really going to put some germs on him.
Mrs. Treglassen was found the following week, assumed to have slipped and crushed her trachea on the edge of the tub, which she had in fact done after Phong touched her, and no inquiry was made. The son of the chief of police was found by the coroner to have died from a heart attack with an incidental non-fatal blow to the head from his fall, which was accurate. No witness saw Thang Phong at either site and no one thought to inquire of him if he had had his lesson with Mrs. James on Friday and been thereby possibly the last person to see her alive. He would have said he had a very instructive lesson and that he had indeed been the last person to see her alive if they said so.
There are secret thoughts that each of these people had during these somewhat sad, possibly tawdry, conceivably whimsical events I have recorded. The son of the chief of police, as he Willie Pepped with Thang Phong and could not get by him, suddenly thought that if his father had said he played for Barry Switzer instead of Bear Bryant he would still be in office — it was dumb to lie but there were smart lies and stupid lies — and then he just could not breathe and tried to grab the guy in front of him to keep from going down. Mrs. Horve thought she should have taken Thang’s hand at the keyboard during any one of their hundreds of piano lessons instead of going whole-hog overboard like this and probably scaring the poor thing to death, and then she too just could not breathe. When she saw Thang Phong falling backwards with an alarmed expression on his face, she felt a small hurt of rejection for just a second before the more pressing issue of no air overrode her hurt feelings and in fact wiped her emotional slate, which had been moments ago bristling with hope and energy and girlish moist ideas, clean.
With the police chief’s son tackling him as it were, and smelling awful, and as hot and moist as dim sum, Thang Phong thought, Why you even in my country, get off me (the violent elbowing twist that sent the boy to the ground came with the word off). When Mrs. Grieveport slashed open the curtain and he saw all her puffy whiteness, he was still desperately trying and failing to conjure an image of his own dark mother. His reaching back and forward to prevent falling had no thoughts within it; one merely never wishes to fall, especially on porcelain. The urge to not fall on porcelain is pre-intellectual.
Thang Phong did not ever realize that he was connected to the death of the son of the chief of police, because he never read in the paper about the boy’s being found dead of a heart attack on the sidewalk, and he did not know about the police chief’s troubles, or his troubled boy, or any of it. About Mrs. Nielson’s demise he knew he was responsible, but in a defensible if regrettable manslaughtery self-defensive accidental way only. The guilt that was natural he sought to assuage by playing the piano intensely at concerts that in any way memorialized her: at recitals of her former students, say. When he played at venues unrelated to her, he often found a way to mention that she had been his best teacher and that he considered her not only a world-class teacher but a world-class player in her own right.
It gives me some pleasure, at a time when I have come to not take pleasure in pleasure, to hazard that Thang Phong loved Mrs. Jones, and loves her still. In time of course he came to recall his own mother clearly, but the image of his naked piano teacher reaching for him still comes much more readily to his mind.
Breakdown
One does not decide to stop being oneself; one merely stops deciding to be oneself. There is a quotient of energy the expenditure of which is necessary for one to be perceived in a way one is accustomed to, and to perceive oneself in a way one is accustomed to. And this expenditure becomes optional, its expense even a matter to chuckle at. It is like the energy required to eat meat and to be perceived as a red-blooded kind of dude. Suddenly, or gradually, it would be just as well to be a vegetarian, or anything else. The energy for holding course is gone. It is the incipience, this waving away of the compass bearing, of a nervous breakdown, a term that would disturb someone still holding course but a prospect that sounds inviting to someone waving off the compass. So, ladies, what I mean to say is that I have become a vegan in my head and no longer care who I am or who you think I am. I realize all this makes not a large ripple on the universal pond of vanity.
A bear skinned-out resembles a man, I have heard. This apparently disturbs hunters who have not been disturbed to that point in the adventure of killing a bear. But they get the willies once the hide sits there and the naked bear here.
Mrs. Stamp
A little dialogue played one morning in Mrs. Terrell Stamp’s head:
Don’t sit on that knife.