Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (10 page)

I was to know soon enough. I had to weave old branches and dry reeds into the fixtures of the railing, into a fence to discourage wildlife from poaching away my meagre garden, creatures I never saw but began to hear with increasing frequency. There were those soft squeaking noises from out in the marsh, perhaps only the blades of grass rubbing together, or water dripping in some odd way, or things growing and toppling over. One night I thought I heard a dog barking out there. Another I lay sleepless in the pilot-house, axe in hand, terrorized by the sucking footsteps of a heavy beast which seemed stuck in the mud, which whined and grunted all night long. Next day I found my bathing hole next to the swimming platform befouled by a pair of speckled turds, had to dig a new one. The marsh grass grew higher, well over my head, and once a week I trimmed it back away from the railing, using the stalks to reinforce my fence. I nailed some old boards together into a gate so I could close off the path to the swimming platform at night, hung it with a bell. At times, when looking out over the profusion of growth in the endless marsh, I could not help but remember the first years of the barge when the gardens had been like that, almost impenetrable from one end to the other, and perhaps this too, this land, this shimmering green was somehow being cultivated. Through field-glasses I saw dark masses of green off in the far distance, like ranks of trees. I saw spots of orange and red, like fruit, like flowers; there were pollens in the air, I found handfuls of tiny seeds in nooks and crannies in the pilot-house, in protected corners of the garden where winds had driven them. One day I was startled by the sound of ripping cloth from the tent over the fallen Chestnut Anna and looked up to see a flash of living leaves as a young poplar burst through the rotting cloth near the embrace of one of my old bathrobes and a pair of Unguentine’s overalls. We stared at each other a few minutes, warily. Then I reached up and ripped away some of the cloth, straightened its branches all bent and crooked from the months of confinement.

As resuscitated by the pressures of teeming growth beyond my fence, the gardens revived. I let things grow where they would, how they would, keeping only the vegetable patch weeded, encouraging only a small tree which might some day produce a few fruit, clearing only my pathways from stem to stern and the ambleway up the hill to my belvedere. It was a happy time. While my brain churned with old nautical terms I had long refused to learn and now had no use for, port, starboard, knots and all the speeds ahead and fore and aft, azimuths and pole stars, another part of me awaited dreamily some easy moment when the growth on the barge might reach a vigor and density such that I would be confined to a small green cage, me with my pruning shears all dulled and rusted away and with nothing to do but curl up and find an endless sleep. But my reveries, my simple life soon fell under new harassments. For months I tried to ignore them. When finally I caught a cold, the first in over thirty years, I knew my solitude was at an end. To absentmindedness I had attributed a blank piece of paper tacked to the pilot-house door, that I had put it up one day intending to scrawl some reminder to myself, had forgotten, had rediscovered it next day electrified at the thought that it might be another’s handiwork, had twirled around to stare at the blank green wall of vegetation that stood beyond my fence. I had taken it down, tossed it overboard. There were other signs. Weeds and brush began to vanish from the spot in the center of the barge where once the lawn had stood. I found a neat row of petunias, already beginning to bloom, lining one of my pathways. My tree tents became like greenhouses, another one ripping open every day or so under the thrust of a new growth of saplings. I began to lie in wait. By night I hid in thickets armed with field-glasses and axe, seeking to surprise the intruder and order him off the premises; perhaps it was a farmer sprung suddenly out of the mud to become a neighbour attempting to annex my modest plot by performing nocturnal improvements, intending some day to slap me with a claim. Boundaries? Property lines? Easements? Rights of way? I struggled in my mind to remember how they worked, wondered what to do; even, how to do anything at all. These ten years alone in my hermitage had put me out of speech; I was no longer young, my charms were all silted over, my wardrobe rotted, the silver service leaked, the cups had long since been broken and I had gone to eating off broad leaves, drank tea from an old bottle.

I set up snares one night, a tripwire that crossed the pathways several places in the garden and along the fence so that anyone climbing inside would set the bell on the gate to clanging; next night indeed it clanged, and I heard footsteps running, I heard the crack of branches from my perch atop the pilot-house roof, but saw nothing in the dark. Unguentine, I wondered, clumsy as ever? Come back after a decade away to trouble me with new beginnings? Not long after as my nights grew wary and sleepless, my days a struggle to keep alert, I began to hear the sounds I knew were his coming from out in the marsh, his squeaks, that obscene whistling noise, the humming that sometimes went on for hours. How could I turn a deaf ear? For with them time began to flow again, to wash back over all that had been, to revivify now, to sweep before my eyes old flotsam, old jetsam, old tears that I thought had gone forever from a worn-out memory. Beautiful as it all might have been, once had been enough. Please, not again. But he knew when I slept. One morning I awoke to find a pot of freshly cut daisies on my doorstep; I left them to wilt and die there. Several days later he replaced them. I threw them overboard. Eventually, ten yards beyond my fence and far beyond my reach, he erected a sort of stand like a bird-feeding tray, wired a pot on top of it in such a way that I might not knock it off with a well-heaved dirt clod; daily then the daisies appeared up there, were daily renewed.

His courtship was persistent, even obscene. From my lookouts on the hill and atop the pilot-house I could see in the distance the cane-breaks quiver as he moved about, sometimes spending a whole day circling the barge though never permitting me to have a glimpse of him. Once he wove a great phallus out of sticks and vines, thrust it up through the grass and proceeded to parade it around the barge until sunset. Thus another sleepless night. I grew tired and fell ill. I could see his strategy: bedridden and driven to despair, I would cry for his help. Quickly, with what strength I had left, I harvested all the vegetables that were ripe and would keep, filled the pilot-house with baskets of potatoes, onions, squash and a dozen jugs of water, a small bundle of firewood, and locked the door and pulled the curtains closed. It would be my last and final retreat. I had already lived too long as it was. If he wished, he could take over the rest of the barge so long as he left me in peace. He could even repair the hull and dredge the mud from the hold and dig a channel-way to the sea and set sail again for all I cared, and as my fever rose and I lay back upon the hard mattress and closed my eyes, I knew I would even resist his whisperings under the door, his notes, his glossy descriptions of fantastic seascapes, of waves, of seagulls perching expectant on the railings, the sound of the wind through the trees and flapping sails, I would plug my ears up, not listen, not hear. Yet my resolve wavered now and then. Before nightfall, my temperature dropping a degree or two, I would eat some carrots, sip water, then draw myself to my feet and unsteadily part the curtains a fraction of an inch, peep out. Nothing changed. He was never to be seen out there. Silently each day the chamber-pot I slipped out of the door, my mortalities within, vanished to be returned cleaned and empty. I became bored. I ate too much, grew fat, grasped at the baskets of food he took to leaving outside the door when he had guessed the supply inside was running low. Months passed. It all seemed too familiar. He had trapped me again, or finally, or needlessly into putrefying, bloated and perspiring, in this cramped and angular space; he must have known and calculated that my years of solitude had fortified my will to the degree that I would never again expose my shame to him, never ask his mercy. I stopped eating, drank only a few cups of water a day. I withdrew my hands from my body, would not touch it, would not look down at it in the semi-darkness. All my organs seemed in revolt. They shoved and kicked, swelled and deflated. I submitted to fantasies to pregnancy, some comfort in my lethargy and waiting, of an elderly childbirth upon one of Unguentine’s old sperm which till now had lain dormant within my body like a grain entombed, to burst into germination long after all the walls had fallen. And when the pains finally grew sharp I thought that death should come like that—like childbirth, into the birth of silence and no light—and I stood up one last time and pushed the curtains apart to have a glimpse across the gardens, my fence, to the waves upon waves of velvet green beyond. I fell, then. Someone screamed, I heard sobs, I heard coughing; suddenly I wanted to sleep. But the light from the window was too bright. When I raised my head from the floor, my mouth agape and some strange noise lowly pouring from it, I looked across my huge stomach heaving with contractions and thought to see Unguentine flow slowly out from between my legs and crowd my knees, or a somewhat dwarfish version of him, yet with the white beard, the flowing white hair. He was crouching now, I saw his eyes blink and open, I saw a smile flash across his damp face the instant before his features went rigid and he toppled over backwards with a heavy thud. I could no longer raise my head, see where he was; yet I knew now he had come back to me at last only to die, was dead, to smile only, no more. A rivulet of my blood was soon flowing across the floor in pursuit of him. Soon myself, my body. Thus I joined him.

1972 was a difficult year for the novel. This might—and perhaps should—be said of all years and times, since the novel is forever, genetically, finding everything a struggle and all things difficult (I think we’re supposed to be worried when the novel does not do this). But 1972 was particularly special in its overshadowing, domineering,
mattering
way. It was a year that refused to cede an inch to the make-believe. The merely imaginary might finally have seemed trifling up against some of the defining and grisly moments of the century that collided that year and chewed up every available dose of attention in the culture. 1972, in short, produced the Watergate scandal, the Munich Massacre, and Bloody Sunday. Nixon traveled to China in 1972, and the last U.S. troops finally departed Vietnam. It wasn’t clear that a novel had leverage against all of this atrocity, deceit, transgression, and milestone, let alone a novel posing as a ship’s log, narrated by a widowed ship slave who has witnessed logic-defying architecture, radical ecological invention, and faked a pregnancy while being banished—by her alcoholic, abusive husband—from all land and humanity.

Forget that painting (or sculpture, or the better poetry) was never asked to compete with the news, or to be the news. The novel’s weird burden of relevance—to reflect and anticipate the times, to grab headlines, to be somehow current, while not also disgracing the language—was being shirked all over the place, and Stanley Crawford, already unusually capable of uncoiling his brain and repacking it in his head in a new, gnarled design for every book he wrote, was chief among those writers who seemed siloed in a special, ahistorical field, working with private alchemical tools, producing work just out of tune enough to disrupt the flight of the birds that passed his hideout.

Architectural dreamwork, end-times seascapes so barren they seem cut from the pages of the Bible, coolly-rendered Rube Goldberg apparati, and the crushing sadness that results when you tie your emotional fortunes to a person whose tongue is so fat in his mouth he can barely speak, mark this little masterpiece of a novel. Cast as a soliloquy in the form of a ship’s log, a grief report from someone who has no good insurance she will ever be heard, the novel moves fluidly between its major forms: love song, a treatise on gardening at sea, an argument against the company of others, and a dark science expo for exquisite inventions like a hybrid lichen that makes things invisible. Published by Alfred A. Knopf under the editorial guidance of Gordon Lish, the fiction world’s singular Quixote—a champion of innovative styles and formal ambition—there may have been no better year in which to tuck such an odd, exquisite book. Instead of rushing for relevance and breaking the news, Crawford was taking the oldest news of all—it is strange and alone here, even when we are surrounded by people, and there is a great degree of pain to be felt—and reporting it as nautical confessional. The result, now thirty-six years later, seems to prove that interior news, the news of what it feels like to want too much from another person, will not readily smother under archival dust.

To be sure, Crawfords focus in
Log
—the special toxins that steam off of a marriage—was happily at-large in the literary work of his peers (possibly so much at-large that its shadow is still staining the ground on which we walk), but while most of Crawford’s contemporaries were staging their loveless, white-knuckle relationship fiction in a spume of alcohol, boxed up in fresh suburban sheet rock, Crawford put his unhappily married couple, the Unguentines, to sea, rendered them as solitary (if not so innocent) as Adam and Eve, and he cursed them to be so awkwardly fit for human behavior that every kind of congress had to be reinvented and mythologized anew. If
The Mrs Unguentine
is so large and equipped it seems more like an island, it is also a floating stage for human experimentation, beyond the strictures of society, and the novel itself is a playbook for rethinking just what two people are supposed to do together when most of the livable world is out of reach. And to make their dilemma special, so we could see the nosedive of the Unguentines’ failed love through a crystal lens that Crawford ground himself from his own blend, he canopied the bad marriage with a fantastical dome, a literary invention so beautiful it doesn’t hog the spotlight so much as become a kind of distorted monocle through which to see this experiment in isolation, gardening, and love go terribly, terribly wrong.