From time to time I highlight certain passages that I needed to cut from my book, The Long Habit of Living. They aren't necessarily stand-alone pieces, but they might give you an inkling about the characters in the novel, how I write, the tone of the narrative.
Everett Cooper
Everett Cooper leaned against the door frame of our office. His left hand was tucked under his right elbow, his left leg bent with the foot placed behind his right leg. A cigarette burned, waiting, in his hand. It was summer 1979, and smoking was still permitted almost everywhere in New York.
“So I was
saying to my friend Margo," Everett said, "if there are any more drug
dealers who need a roosting spot, the park near my building is perfect for
them. They can swoop down and spread
their fucking drugs, like Santa spreads his gifts, all over the alcoholics who've made nice homes out of
benches and smelly cardboard boxes.
They're sure to make lots of money."
He shook
with uncontrolled internal laughter.
After he
finished speaking, I took a moment to focus my attention on what he'd just
said. I didn't know what he was talking
about, and I said I hadn't heard there were heroin dealers in his
neighborhood. Everett, surprised at my
ignorance, drew me an elaborate verbal portrait of the homeless heaven across
the street from his apartment on Irving Place and beneath his windows, all the
time assuming I already knew the details.
He had a habit of beginning a conversation with one person at the point
in which he'd stopped the same conversation with someone else. It was an undying commentary; anyone could be
the beneficiary of it at any time.
Everett
Cooper was a sixty-eight-year old copyeditor.
He was tall, with a slight paunch, a thinned-out but nonetheless austere
head of hair which he slicked back and combed to the right. He wore ancient slacks and shirts which
usually needed pressing and repair. He
chain-smoked cigarettes in a cigarette holder and never let an hour go by
without relating some story from his past.
He often talked about the days when he worked for the famous editor Malcolm
Cowley, a job he secured after his discharge from the U.S. Army, when he’d served in World
War II in the Pacific; New Caledonia to be exact.
He was
always going on about the latest restrictive or nonrestrictive rule he
discovered in the Chicago Manual of Style.
He could spend an hour discussing the dependent clause. Whenever he was bored or when the nicotine
and caffeine had him bursting inside, he would reflect sentimentally about his
boyhood life in Baltimore or when he was a college student before the outbreak
of the Second World War.
"It's
ridiculous!" he exclaimed. He walked away from the door, and paced up
and down in front of my desk. Our office
was on the fourth floor of a 19th-century brownstone near Gramercy Park, and
the wooden floor creaked and agonized with every step. I turned my IBM Selectric typewriter off and
stretched my arms and legs. It was time
to stop working.
"And
if the oil companies don't give a damn, why should I?" he queried to the
nameless, invisible minions before him.
He sat on
top of an empty desk on the opposite side of the room, and scratched his head
with the ring finger of the hand that held his cigarette.
"I
really don't see the point," I said, hoping to get out for lunch early, meet Owen in Wall Street, and not to think about drug dealers, oil companies,
and Gramercy Park. But for anyone who
has studied psychology or thinks he has studied psychology, Everett Cooper was
actually working out a problem by not talking about it. He was a recovering alcoholic, and he revealed
himself not in terms of exposition but in the way he concealed elements of the
obvious. Most of our fellow employees
found him outdated, difficult, tedious.
I was fascinated by him.
"Well,
see here," he would say, then proceed to explain the illusions of the
American people.
I always listened
respectfully to him, as I'd grown very fond of him and found that once he was
through with his tirade the story he really wanted to tell would somehow emerge
in so startling a turn of storytelling as to focus on something far more
painful, far more personal than current events and political betrayals and
corporate greed. It would take me to a
reminiscence that, although entirely his own, would in years to come end up being
claimed as my own. His memory could be
as engrossing as a tale of the South Pacific and as mundane as what his cat had
shredded that morning at home.
"It's
like this, Walter. If the oil companies
really want to exercise complete control over us, which they already do nominally, anyway, have for
decades, why not use that power to get rid of crime in this city? It's simple.
I don't know why they haven't thought of it sooner."
He puffed
with a slight smack of his lips against the cigarette.
"I
mean, kill a president kill a mugger.
Kill a civil rights leader, kill a car thief or a drug dealer. It's all profit. They'd make more if we bought more and we'd
buy more if we felt we were safer. And
we don't stay out later buying because we're afraid we'll get our asses kicked
by a crack addict."
"Maybe
they don't want to spend the money," I said.
"Maybe
they're investing in the drug dealers," he exclaimed, laughing out loud
and slapping his knee. "My niece in
Maryland
tells me she's never seen heroin traffickers or drug busts and all that prime
time bullshit we see on TV. I suppose I
should go and live with her. I might survive
longer living in an illusion."
"Has
she offered?" I asked.
"Oh
God, yes," he said, sucking on one of the stems of his eyeglasses. "But I can't live down there with her
and those beautiful kids of hers. You
don't want to...I'd have to become the charming and affectionate
uncle...," he said. He shook with
laughter. "What would my demons
say?"
The truth
was he hated Maryland . He'd grown up there. As a boy, he was raised by two maiden aunts,
his mother's sisters, after his father had deserted the family and moved out
West. His father was an engineer and,
during the 1930s, had invented a pendulum operated by a battery that kept
lighthouses perpetually lit: It eliminated the need for human beings to keep
watch over these lighthouses up and down the Eastern seaboard. It saved the
government a lot of money. The patent
brought his father a welcomed addition to a minuscule income--which he used to
abandon his family.
Everett Cooper's
mother couldn't cope with her husband’s desertion. Refusing to believe that
her life had changed permanently for the worse, she had created a pleasing, unabusive
insanity for herself, neglecting her children in favor of her maiden sisters. She was finally committed to an asylum.
He lit
another cigarette and began to pace again.
His features had grown into a sad triangular relief with a nod to his
family’s nostalgic longing for their absent father and the once quiet, clean,
and ordered ruthlessness of Baltimore’s turn-of-the-century gentry. His cheek bones had defined the shape of an
upside down pyramid, the bags under his eyes were balanced by a few fat
deposits on his eyelids, carrying the weight of forgiven alcoholics, late-night
reading, 12-step programs, therapy, and the abandoned family. A failed person, Everett was so unlike old
Mr. Cooper--the engineer-father, whose good family name could not keep him
home at nights or in the same town as his wife and children.
But he,
Everett, believed that he was the one who failed, and he was paying the price. He left college and joined the Army.
“When I came
home from the Pacific theater, I discovered gin,” he said.
He realized
that he liked the well-made martini more than he liked attending classes and
planning for the future. His return to
Baltimore had started a run of forty years of drinking himself senseless, a
portraiture cleverly encased in a variety of short-lived occupations.
Because of
his lengthy employment, and because our employers were Quakers, management had been dragged through the trenches of Everett
Cooper’s prolonged alcoholism. They had put up with his truancy and his
sickness and his spirited, colorful vocabulary reeking of gin; he was after all very good at what he did. He had seen long regretful afternoons and
crowded nights of storytelling in the many nefarious gay bars he’d frequented
in the Village or on the Upper West Side.
He’d told me that his self-punishing behavior had been directed against
the iron fists of his aunts, against a predetermined commitment of gentility
and intelligence, of forbearance and strength in the line of family life.
Poor Everett
Cooper, aside from the fact that he was more than twice my age and extremely
proud, I wished I could have been a closer friend to him. He treated me with a civil affection that
regarded my points of view with hilarity, and he approached my underling status
with a protection that comes from older men affectionately watching younger ones make those
old-fashioned, predetermined, identifiable mistakes.
"I
don't know why my mother found us a burden," he said looking at the plaster and brick wall opposite him. "My experience told me you didn't have
to do much anyway. Just act
sensible. Tell us what to do. Make sure the windows and the doors are
locked at night, and we kids will take care of ourselves," he laughed.
"Do
you wish you had children, Everett?" I asked.
"I
wish I had a father," he replied.
The wish
was a mirror to what Owen had said the first time he met Everett Cooper. I invited him and Sarah to an office
Christmas party and he described my colleague to me as one of those angels sent
to earth to do penance, the kind whom the French writer Anatole France would
write about or the sculptor Rodin give birth to an image of; but Everett's
dilemma was that he didn't know what he'd done wrong nor would he know when his
contrition was completed. Owen liked him
and was always attentive when I brought his name up in conversation.
When I told
Owen about what Everett had said about having a father, he became pale. Owen could be very sensitized to the hurt of
others, much less to his own--his father had died at a very young age from
alcoholism.
"A
waste of life," Owen had choked, barely able to speak.
I knew, as
I related young Mr. Cooper's unfortunate fall, that Owen regarded his own
father's death with an encyclopedic sense of guilt, and it grew out of him like
a great oak tree and waved its hideous, mirrored leaves in front of his face. I knew that Owen and his father and Everett
Cooper--the wounded, fallen angel who worked with me on the fourth floor of
that East Side brownstone--were among the uncounted, unrepresented men out of
step with the world.
"I’m
more than sixty years old," Everett had mused that one afternoon, flicking
the ash off his cigarette and dangling his feet. "And I still want to call someone
father."
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