The kid had the looks for it. He was a bland kid with steely blue eyes and steely blue stubble.
“Okay, great. Hey, is there an old graveyard around here? Wouldn’t it be fun if we met in an old graveyard? I think class should meet in an old, abandoned graveyard.”
It was Cookie’s last idea.
5
The town was nice anyway. There was a rare old family called the Crowns. They were seven sisters with captivating eyes and long white hair pulled back, strong, beautiful, athletic women who gardened, all in their sixties or early seventies, blessed with glowing complexions, the radiant Crowns, ageless goddesses of Mississippi.
Each Crown sister was married to a prominent local gentleman — the sheriff, for example. An obstetrician. The town historian. A guy who owned buildings.
Each of the seven husbands had a different surname — Melvis, Ronson, Turner, Blot, Garland, Chesterfield, Mayhew — but all of them were thought of as Crowns.
Cookie loved the Crown sisters. They held the ghost college in disdain and merrily encouraged him to gossip about it. He would go to their houses and sit in chairs overlooking their gardens and drink cold martinis as the sun went down. He imagined himself into the peaceful existence of a country squire.
“I can do what I do from anywhere,” he said.
“Nothing?” said his wife.
“Yes, I can do nothing from anywhere.”
The Fellowship had all but expired, and it was time to pack up and return to their penthouse in the big city. Cookie didn’t want to go.
“You’re a nature poet,” he said. “Don’t you want to live in nature?”
The nature poet explained that nature is everywhere and she wanted to live in her luxurious penthouse, near her friends and surrounded by her worldly possessions. But Cookie was on the verge of that new thing, he said, that famous new thing.
He had made a mistake, secretly keeping up his pie assignments at the expense of his popular murder novel.
After his wife went back to the city for good, leaving Cookie behind, he occupied himself mainly with old movies and drinking.
He was so glad to have a TV again. When he didn’t have one, he thought about it every day.
“I wonder what’s on TV right now,” he would say.
“You can watch TV on the internet,” his wife told him.
“It’s not the same,” he said. “I’m old.”
The morning she left to go back to the city, she dropped by Cookie’s new place on her way out of town. He showed her all the musty furniture with which the house had come furnished and the place where the TV would go.
“You don’t have to pay for one. It’s a waste. You should just come get ours,” she said.
“But it’s not a flatscreen.”
“So what? It has a nice big screen.”
“It’s shaped differently than TVs are shaped now. To have one in your home is kind of like walking around in…what’s something unfashionable to walk around in?”
“A burnoose,” said the nature poet.
“Yeah,” said Cookie. “And when you watch the square TV, the sides of all the new shows are cut off. Like maybe there are people standing off to the side of the stage doing funny stuff on Saturday Night Live, and I can’t see them. Sometimes I see a shoulder or a hand on the edge of the screen and wonder what I’m missing. On the other hand, I like old movies, and what I can’t figure out is, what if I’m watching a movie from the ’40s, you know, before widescreen. Like, say I’m watching White Heat. Is that ’40s or ’50s? Anyway, it’s not widescreen. Would Cagney’s face be stretched out in a grotesque fashion, beyond recognition? When I close my eyes I can imagine how Jimmy Cagney’s big, wide, stretched-out face would look, taking up the whole screen. It’s nightmarish. There’s probably a button you can push to fix the aspect ratio, don’t you think?”
“Our TV is fine,” said the nature poet.
“Well, if I take custody of our TV, what are you going to do for TV?”
“I’m not big on TV.”
“I’ve seen you watch a lot of TV. I’ve seen you watch the worst stuff. Lifetime movies. A young teacher goes on vacation and some unsavory fellows videotape her on the beach then edit the results to make her look sleazy and sell it on the internet. Her professional and personal lives suffer as a result. The wedding is called off. She fights to regain her dignity.”
“Caught on Tape,” said the nature poet. “I forget the subtitle.”
“Those Lifetime movies always have subtitles. I love it!”
“I think I can live without it. I’ve enjoyed not having it around.”
“What, are you going to be one of those people who goes around saying, ‘I don’t even own a TV’?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s like I don’t even know you,” said Cookie.
They laughed. It was one of their standard lines. But they stopped laughing sooner than usual. Then they changed the subject to why she had started buying unscented antiperspirant for them. Cookie could never remember whether or not he had put it on.
Cookie did eventually make the long drive to the big city to pick up the TV. He wasn’t sure which dramatic event he thought would happen, but whatever it was, it didn’t.
He and his wife walked across the street that night to a tapas restaurant with a huge picture window and the business of the city going on outside. They ordered a number of exotic dishes, like mashed green plantains with pork cracklings and an aromatic broth and tiny shrimp. It all came mixed together in a shallow silver bowl with a silver lid, and when they opened the lid up came the aromatic steam from the aromatic broth.
Cookie was going to miss stuff like that: aromatic broth and stuff.
They slept in the same bed that night. It was friendly. The bedroom had a lot of books in it.
“What about your books?” said Cookie’s wife.
“I don’t care about them anymore,” said Cookie. “I know each one of them even in the dark, just by the vague sight of their spines. I see a pale one, which is Journal of a West India Proprietor. I remember where I bought it. City Lights in San Francisco. In 1999! The last century. I never read it. Last time I opened it, the pages were brown. I keep meaning to read it. Now I know I never will, and part of me is relieved. All of me.”
The nature poet laughed.
“What?”
“I’m giving up TV and you’re giving up books,” she said.
They both laughed. They laughed and laughed.
Ha ha ha.It was so friendly.
The next morning, when the big, ugly TV had been lugged out of the penthouse and wedged into the small car, Cookie knew he was really going to leave. It was too hard to imagine hauling it back up.
The slogan on the license plate had taken on a melancholy resonance.
They kissed goodbye in the parking garage, among the rancid perfumes.
Cookie kept in touch with his wife, calling her, for example, the time he found a lump on his wrist.
“It’s probably a ganglion,” she said.
“You know everything,” he said.
“They used to call them Bible bumps,” she said.
“Bible bumps!” he said.
“They’d smash the ganglion with something big and heavy, like the old family Bible. The fluid would disperse and go back where it’s supposed to go.”
6
Now that he and his wife were living apart, Cookie often found himself reminiscing about the jerk who had refused to let her bum a smoke. True, his wife was a champion mooch.
He remembered how they saw the town cobbler leaning on a lamppost with his ciggie and a certain look on his face like a horrible movie star.