the missing
by
Douglas Messerli
Don
Skiles Across the Street from the Ordinary (Claremont, California:
Pelekinesis,2020)
A
blurb for Don Skiles’ previous collection of short stories suggests that his Rain
After Midnight might be “thought of as filmic, as a ‘long story short.’ The
shortness of the form works like the compression required in a good poem. …As
the French film director Godard said, when a reporter asked him if he thought
that a film should have a beginning, middle and end, he answered, ‘Yes. But not
necessarily in that order.’”
I first noticed this interconnection of
words, images, and themes through a repetition of a quote by Oscar Wilde. In the
very first story of this fascinating collection, “Iron City,” a young college
student at Duquesne—not Carnegie Tech or the University of Pittsburgh, but the
only one that he might afford to attend—finds even his current funds to be “dwindling,”
and seeks out the advice his favorite professor, a history teacher, about his
future plans. He thinks, perhaps, the he will join the Air Force or even, as
his brother had, the Marine Corps, to which the professor responds: “Join the
service! Somebody with the brains you’ve got? Be an enlisted man? Do you
have any idea what that means? At all?”
Later, he falls in love the “beautiful
neck” of a girl he sits behind in his psychology class, Mary Ann Filardi, with
dark hair, worn long (a great many of the girls in this collection have dark
hair that the male figures find attractive). But the minute he finally is able
to strike up a conersation with her, the subject turns quickly from music and
where it comes from to her important query suggesting where he might be headed
in his life.
‘You wonder if you’ll live here—in
Pittsburgh—for the rest of your
life?’
‘There could be worse things,’ he said,
but as soon as he’d said it,
he knew it wasn’t right. ‘I don’t
know—I just feel, what I’m
looking for, I’m not going to find it
here.’
‘I
understand…’ she said. ‘I feel the same thing, sometimes…”
….
‘Maybe I’ll go to San Francisco,’ he
said, looking down towards
the city in its haze. ‘You know what
they say…”
‘No I don’t know what they say,’ Mary
Ann said a bit petulantly,
not like her.
He sighed. ‘They say—Oscar Wilde
said—that it’s a curious thing,
but everyone who goes missing turns
up in San Francisco.’
She said nothing for a while and he
began to feel uneasy. He’d
overstepped some kind of boundary.
‘It’s a long way, San Francisco. A long
way away.”
That’s
the last we see of Mary Ann, and the young would-be scholar for that matter.
All we know is that his desire to leave her world has cut off any relationship
they might possibly have had.
The same quote appears again in one of the
stories central to Skiles’ work, “All Along the Watchtower.” The hero of this
story, who has apparently been in the Air Force for 4 years, lives in Illinois
where he is now teaching at a university. This version of our hero, who has even
traveled to San Francisco, is now stuck in the arctic cold of Illinois, dating
a girl with the midwestern name of Judy Jones, a woman who everyone finds to be
stunningly beautiful and about whom he has developed an almost jealous love, a
love endangered by his own fears that he will lose her, eventually, to someone
else. Yet, after the two attend a Jimi Hendrix concert in Chicago, he soon
after realizes that the reason he will lose her is his own inability, despite a
symbolic jump over a stick in the moonlight (a tradition of marriage that goes
by to the black slaves), stems from his own lack of commitment, a sudden realization
that forces him to perceive “I would never marry her, despite our October ceremony
in the woods. I would leave her.”
Driving home from her Elmhurst family
house, he feels sick with the sorrow of losing her, as his mind reels out the
spaces between where he now is and nearby states, the Great Plains, and finally
the West. “If I kept going long enough, if I could keep going long enough, I would
wind up in San Francisco, the city Oscar Wilde said everyone reported missing
eventually turned up. Staring into the receding darkness in front of the
headlights’ beams, that is always curling out in front of you,
beckoning. Come on with me.”
If one may suspect that the connection of
Wilde and San Francisco is hinting of this 27-year old and the young figure in
the first story may be gay, the author certainly never confirms it. The figures
of these stories are mainly heterosexuals: students, airman, writers (both
living and dead) professors, and traveling strangers who all try to make a
difference from the past in living their lives.
Yet, with the exception of one figure (a Haruki
Murakami-obsessed writer of “Ghost Ball”) is married, while almost all of the
characters of Skiles’ stories, male and female, are people who suddenly
disappear from other peoples’ lives.
In one story (“An Occurrence on 19th
Street) a young man driving through a wealthy neighborhood of what appears to
be San Francisco, encounters a girl holding a sign reading “Reject Capitalist
Lies,” so attracting the male driver that he stops at a nearby Starbucks,
hoping to spot her yet again. He quickly realizes how ridiculous it is that he
might run into her in such a truly capitalist-based establishment, but does,
after a while, observe her in the crowd just before she leaves the coffee-house.
For a moment he thinks of running after her, but can imagine nothing which he
might properly say (“Forget it. She might see me as another street
weirdo, or an FBI informant”) and he simply walks back to his parked car.
Another longer tale, “Skegness Annie,”
concerns a slightly long-in-the-tooth English girl who regularly attends the
dances at the airbase in Fen county, 20 miles from Cambridge. She is no beauty,
and has been to these dances for so many years that the airmen joke about her.
But when she suddenly disappears the narrator laments “Annie vanished, with a
sort of fame of her own. She wasn’t an English rose, but… From time to time,
somebody would say they’d seen her (or heard that she’d been seen)—in
Cambridge, in Ely, in Peterborough.”
Similarly, my very favorite story in this
collection (“A Short History of Elizabethan Drama”) centers on a young 28-year
old Shakespeare teacher, still a graduate student, who mesmerizes and delights
his 49-some students, particularly the young hero attending his class who begins
to read all of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets late into the night. No one
misses this lecturer’s 1:00 classes, even on Fridays. Yet the central character’s
friend believes the teacher, Stevens, won’t last because “There’s something
wrong with the guy, essentially wrong. ,,,He just doesn’t fit.”
The narrator can’t imagine what could be
wrong with a man who not only brilliantly teaches the Bard but also encourages
his students to see films by Bergman and Fellini. “And then, he was gone…Stevens
was gone. The news spread on the campus like the proverbial wildfire. I was
sitting in the cafeteria, my hands cradling a large cup of steaming coffee, eating
a donut, when I heard another student at the table say it. “Did a bunk… teaches
the Shakespeare class, that one?’ As with Skegness Annie, theories of his
whereabouts and the reasons for his leaving become the stuff of rumor.
At another point, a narrator goes down the
list of his former air buddies, leaving us with only slight bit and pieces of
their lives, now missing from his own—except for one, Harmon, whom he suddenly
encounters one night in San Francisco on a streetcar before himself suddenly
running off. The name Harmon reappears in other stories as well.
The redwood bar of The Odyssey in Palo
Alto is transmogrified into “a long, high beautifully polished wooden bar
running nearly the length of the wide room” in a Madrid bar. And the Bridgeway
of Sausalito becomes the famed Malecón of Havana. The landscapes of
these stories are punctuated by Pre-Raphaelite girls and men smoking Tareyton
cigarettes.
Skiles uses these dozens of connecting
links, quotations, images, names, smells, etc. as a kind of echo chamber of the
memory to fill up all the missing persons who accumulate in the street just
across from the ordinary, where, presumably, people stay put both in body and
mind.
Nearly all the figures of this author’s lovely
tales just don’t fit it, and have no choice but to leave the stolid realities
created by the so-called “real” worlds nearby. If these missing men and women
are not truly “gay,” they are, nonetheless, when compared with what is
happening across the street or just around the corner, queer, misplaced, and
odd.in their passions and desires. Even the wife knows how difficult it is to be married
to a writer, refusing to even read about the magical realist world created by
Gabriel García Márquez.
Los
Angeles, July 25, 2020
Reprinted
from EXPLORINGfinctions (July 2020).
