The Business of Naming Things Read online

She immediately turned, sharp on one toe—she had heels on. Her dress was a green pinafore and her legs were stockinged white. Her figure was as narrow as an ironing board.

  She strode back to an older balding man with square tinted glasses, like the ones Ari Onassis wore. He looked evenly at Claimer over the woman’s shoulder. Her hair was a brassy yellow and hung straight down her back, ending at the middle of her small ass like a perfect broom. The man said something to her, and the two of them moved on.

  Later, sipping the coffee that tasted as if two cubes of cardboard had been dissolved in it, he saw them again. Claimer was on the main floor, cupped in his seat. He could see them milling about at the top of the escalator, looking for Henry.

  Claimer was tempted to do it, claim he was just checking them out, that he really was Henry, and take it from there. These are the kinds of things people do in stories—they walk up and become another person just to see where it will take them. Claimer liked that, the abandon of it, and wished it for himself. That’s when he realized what he was: in the business of naming things. Like Adam.

  GOING THROUGH OSSINING, Claimer took note of a few trackside haunts visible from the train. He imagined them to once have been frequented by John Cheever, who used to live in a big house up from the river. The yacht club, with a bar; the boatyard filled with cabin cruisers in dry dock, in one of which Cheever would have drinks with a friend and never sail, but instead conjure deck-rail views of the wisping spumes of the sea, and quote Conrad; along the track bed the late asters riffling. Cheever would have noted them, too.

  Above Ossining, after the prison with its gray walls topped by a mad scribble of razor wire, north and across the river, a white gull settled in the middle of a landfill covered with black plastic, gentle as a thought. Claimer kept it in his mind’s eye for miles.

  THE MAN SEATED NEXT TO HIM was a linguist at Bard. Claimer had met him once at an MLA symposium on the Latinate in Hopkins, but he’d forgotten the fellow’s name. Claimer struck up a conversation anyway. His field of inquiry was the structural analysis of the infinitive to seem. When Claimer asked him how he’d ever come to have such a specialty in life—for Claimer, a specialist himself, was always interested in precise choices in a world of unreason—the man said he didn’t know.

  Claimer asked him if he knew the Wallace Stevens poem that ends “let be be finale of seem.”

  The man said he’d read it as a student. He even remembered the title, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” “Perhaps that’s what did it,” he said, returning to his PowerBook.

  “Did what?” asked Claimer.

  There was no reply.

  “What do you think of Saussure?” ventured Claimer. He opened his own PowerBook to signal his agreement that work, not idle chatter, was the primary interest. He called up LING, his dictionary of linguistic terms (he had several of the Penguin category lexicons—math, music, geology, botany—on his hard drive).

  “He was skeptical too early, like Nietzsche,” said the linguist, who introduced himself—Alston Remard—and proffered a hand. “They both were just guessing.”

  “The word is a sign made up of signified and signifier,” recited Claimer. He then gave his own name. “And the relationship of signifier to signified is totally arbitrary. What do you think of that?”

  “Gobbledygook,” remarked Remard with a broad smile. A homely man, thought Claimer. His face, in repose, was pitched in a kind of dignified gloom. But when grinning, he looked crazed and dim.

  “You’re wrong,” said Claimer, smiling back but then quitting it. “People will believe anything. Joes become Joes, when they should be Jims. Morgan—Morgan?—becomes Morgan, well, somehow. People even say in-FIN-ity for that car, for crissakes.”

  “I own one,” said Remard. “What do you call it?”

  “Forget it,” said Claimer.

  Claimer tried another tack, for the sport of it, but the linguist didn’t want to talk about whether the unconscious was structured like a language. And Rhinecliff, the Bard College stop, was next. As the homely little linguist trundled off toward the end of the car, Claimer thought to himself, If a playwright and a beer and a college can all be called Bard, who’s right then anyway, asshole?

  North of Albany, Claimer found himself becoming fatigued. Middle age, which Claimer would only concede was approaching, had a smaller tank. As the track cut through the umber fields between Saratoga and Whitehall, he found himself having such profound thoughts as: Are the smarter cows the ones who seem to notice the train and look up, or the ones who remember seeing the train every day and don’t?

  In the bottomland between two fields of browned clover ran a dark vein. The Scottish call it “a burn.” It fell drippingly into the wide, calm heart of Lake Champlain. Claimer fell asleep for a while.

  IT WAS ONE OF HIS FAVORITES, Jump Hill; perhaps because it was in the Adirondacks, where he’d grown up; or perhaps because he took possession of a unit there in return for his naming the community. It was a small two-bedroom just off the management office and groundskeeper’s shed.

  Jump Hill, the name, had come easily to him. The twenty-six-unit development was built on a hill west of Lake Placid, with a view of the ninety- and seventy-meter ski jumps. It was a name simple, modest, and light—it sounded like a childhood nickname for a favorite sledding slope. The community was eight years old now and it wanted to change its name. The nerve.

  The article Claimer’d found darkening around his fish was from a Providence weekly, credited to the Scripps-Howard news service. It looked like a little space filler on a page otherwise full of menus and housecleaning tips. Claimer took it out of his briefcase and read it:

  What’s in a Name?

  “We have nothing against Olympic sports, and we are proud of the Olympic tradition in this area,” said Kallie Ford to a roomful of fellow condo owners at Jump Hill, near Lake Placid, N.Y. “We just wish to acknowledge what we feel is a more significant legacy of the land on which we dwell—I now christen our home, our development, Timbucto.”

  By unanimous vote of the 26 shareholding parties at the 8-year-old cedar-shingle development set high upon a hill in New York’s Essex County, about 100 miles northwest of Albany, a small community’s name was thus changed. Jump Hill, the name by which the community had been known since before ground was broken, is a reference to the two Olympic ski jumps visible on a mound to the east of the property. Buyers of the one-, two-, and three-bedroom units, which were originally priced in the $40,000–$85,000 range, had no choice in the original naming of the community. There is considerable dispute in the region as to whether another bid for an upcoming Winter Olympics should be made, and to what purpose the ski jumps stand.

  Ms. Ford, before calling for the show of hands voting the new name, reminded the assembled property owners that the original name was the creation of “a paid consultant who never came here and never will. He just took a check.” [Claimer would be pleased to remind Ms. Kallie Ford that he did not receive a check for naming Jump Hill, that he was indeed a bona fide shareholder and that he was not informed of the vote, as called for in the bylaws. Not unanimous.] Timbucto [the article concluded] was the name of a short-lived settlement of free blacks in the 19th century.

  This was nothing Claimer’d run across in his research, though admittedly he’d done rather little of it for this job, since he was a native of the area and felt he knew the history and terrain well enough to fulfill his duties. But it had been eight or nine years, probably ten, since he’d done the actual work. He checked on his PowerBook. A few summers ago, before the incarceration, he’d paid his son ten dollars an hour to input notes from his case files.

  He searched for “Jump” and found the file:

  1984. Fessette & Doe Bldrs. Justnow Corp. Chittenden Bank (Burlington, Vt.). 1, 2, 3. 26U. Olympic site, ’32, ’80. U.S. beat USSR. Craig & Dad.

  I remember that [This must be Pall, on a stoned riff, Claimer thought]. The big triumph over the Russians, what an upset, the gold me
dal, and weren’t the hostages being held? And the goalie named Jim Craig, all sweaty still in his pads skating through the pandemonium on the ice, guys raising their sticks & hugging & falling down, the crowd going nuts, & this goalie who’d played great looking for his father in the crowd & you could see his mouth going Where’s my Dad? Where’s my Dad? with a pained look on his face.

  Claimer was touched by this. Jesus, we always hurt our children. The text went on:

  Bucker & I broke into the Field House one night. The ice was still up & the rink was dark except for the surface itself, which had a pale glow. We took turns sliding on our shoes from in front of the crease, zigging & zagging back & forth over to the boards, shouting Where’s my Dad? Where’s my Dad? Laughing hysterically. Bucker’s Dad was some drunk who’d moved back to Texas & mine—Dear Dad, are you reading this? Oh, you were a good guy all right. I’m still laughing.

  Pall was a handsome boy. He looked like that actor Johnny Depp. That is to say, he had soulful eyes, ratty hair, and a theatrical pout. The boy was a mistake, as Claimer’s generation called births that occurred despite Copper-7’s and diaphragms and the Pill. Pall’s early childhood hyperkinesis was, as the Claimers had hoped, only a stage, but unfortunately one that gave way to a profound indolence. The kid sleep-walked his way through the Dalton School and a year at Oberlin, to which he said good-bye, apparently without having cracked a book.

  Claimer insisted that the boy reenroll somewhere, and Pall announced that he was headed for Paul Smith’s College, a school specializing in forestry up near Saranac Lake. It had some other specialties, too.

  “What do you know about it?” asked the father, a little guiltily.

  “It’s a party school, Dad.”

  At least it’s not because of the Paul, reasoned Claimer to himself.

  So Pall holed up in the Jump Hill condo, which wasn’t far from the campus, for two years, doing God knows what. He left school again, in the spring of ’87, and was arrested with five pounds of dope while heading into Canada.

  Claimer’s lawyers were hopeless in the Quebec courts, and Pall was serving a harsh eight-to-twelve-year sentence at St. Vincent de Paul (again!) prison outside of Montreal.

  Claimer had plans to visit his son once he’d checked out the Jump Hill—or rather, Timbucto—situation. He was more curious than anything; he couldn’t have cared less that the name had been changed, nor was he really miffed about not being notified of the vote. After all, as the little article said, what’s in a name?

  Claimer hadn’t been upstate in several years—during Pall’s trial, and the painful visits to St. Vincent de Paul’s, he’d gone straight to Montreal by plane, skipping altogether the North Country. The last time Claimer’d actually been to northern New York State was when he opened the condo one winter—it was ’89 or so—to see if he really wanted to rent it out, now that Pall had vacated for other accommodations to the north. He and Clare had stayed at Mirror Lake Inn. All he could remember was that they had some good lovemaking in the snow-silenced dawn. The good old days.

  The train trip dragged on. Perhaps it was the teenage rowdiness up at the front of the car that prolonged the journey. His son’s kind of people, a mixed group of eight encamped at one end, the boys, their big boots braced on the seats, swilling Molson and loudly crunching potato chips, empty cardboard trays skating about underneath the seats, the girls a bit more demure, peeling fruit, chewing gum. One was particularly pretty; she had a little bobbed hairdo like that figure skater Dorothy Hamill. She talked incessantly in a soft voice while the boys gamboled about and the other girls looked at the boys. She flipped her hair in the middle of every sentence and said “but like.”

  But when Claimer heard her say something about “my grandmother’s ex-boyfriend,” he felt a wave of affection for this child, out in a world that was already brutalized for her in a way that was all too easy to comprehend: Love didn’t last. He felt flushed with pride that he and Clare were still together—at least technically.

  The station call for Plattsburgh finally came, and Claimer had to endure several minutes of raucous celebration from the Kiddie Korner, as if they were the ones who’d suffered the journey most. He wondered just what forms of revelry awaited them beyond the train. Cartwheels?

  The rental car—gray under a gray sky, a Ford of some sort—sat next to the little depot, keys in it, as the agent had promised. The trusting North Country. In the rearview mirror he did see one of the lads do a standing backflip, like Ozzie Smith.

  Claimer made his way out of Plattsburgh; he knew the way from years past. He took the new—not new, it had to be twenty years old by now—expressway, headed west toward Placid. The sky was getting leaden, clouds indistinguishable from one another. It looked like snow.

  It was almost winter, and not even Election Day yet. A Montreal deejay announced, “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were aboot twenty-five degrees oot and the sun was shining.”

  The clocks had just been turned back, and dark came early. Snow started spitting around Oreville and quickly thickened. The headlights penetrated through cones of dashing white flakes that drew the eye inward, calling for a certain steely caution.

  By the time he got to Mirror Lake Inn, the trees were cuffed in snow. The inn sat above the lake like a cathedral, inviting and warm, lighted as if by jewels.

  After a soothing scotch at the bar, Claimer settled in to his room and then retired. He fell asleep immediately, a colorful tumble of mental imagery dropping him nicely to the floor of unconsciousness like an anchor. He called his wife first thing in the morning, but she was either still asleep or out. Or still out? He read through the room menu—lots of game on it—and he fingered the Gideon’s Bible, reminding himself of the names of the Gospels. But Clare didn’t call, so down he went to his “Adirondack breakfast.”

  He said hello to Jack Trudeau, who was having coffee with a few men in the bright dining room that overlooked Mirror Lake, stolid and black with cold but still open. Jack was Garry’s father. Claimer’d met him at Garry and Jane’s house on the Sound a year or so ago in the course of doing the Southport job. He couldn’t remember if Jack had a piece of the inn or not.

  “What’s this about Jump Hill?” he asked Jack—a handsome gray-haired man with a fast smile.

  “Don’t know, Bill. The return of John Brown? I don’t know.”

  The conversation deteriorated into introductions and then moved on quickly to “Nice to meet you” and “Say hello to Garry and Jane” before any more detail on Timbucto was possible. Claimer sat over his decaf and muffins—he passed on the venison sausage and duck eggs—trying to remember John Brown.

  Claimer called ahead and spoke directly with Ms. Kallie Ford. She answered, “Timbucto. Can I help you?” somewhat embarrassed at the rhyme. You could tell the greeting was still new in her mouth.

  Reading from the deed, he explained to her that he was the shareholder in unit 3 and was in Placid on business and was planning to stop by later in the morning. She laughed like a sparrow being freed. It was quick and disappearing.

  “We look forward to seeing you then,” she said.

  As he drove through the streets of Lake Placid, the snow squeaked and crunched beneath the tires like Styrofoam. Claimer wondered what advantage was smuggled in Ms. Ford’s voice. He’d noted the “we” as well.

  The upstate environs had not really changed much over the years. When Claimer was a boy, there was Plattsburgh, the only genuine city north of Glens Falls, with traffic lights and Canadians and an air force base, and politicians dressed in suits. And it was probably still the only place in the whole of the Adirondacks with a gay bar and a Chinese restaurant. The rest of the area was poor, a lapsed rural economy given over to a corrections industry and truck repair. All the officeholders from the surrounding little towns wore plaid shirts in their election posters. You could still see them posted in the stores and on telephone poles. Placid and Saranac Lake had a bit of shine, by virtue of the winter Olympics of 1980. Some new
structures thrown up, and some fancy stores; a Hilton. But it couldn’t hide the long-term effects of tough winters on the architecture, not to mention the people. Claimer’s wife had once called them “wolfen.”

  Still, Claimer was moved by things that would not change. He admired them. It’s what made him a Republican. In immutability Claimer sensed a certain godliness, a peculiar mix of faith and fear that kept things stable. And he could feel it here, in the North Country. There were even scarecrows in the fields.

  The ski jumps came into view like two Chinese ideograms sketched on a surface of white, each a thin rising stroke that plummeted, dark and thick, to the ground. High up on the hill, he could see the clutter of cedar homes and cars parked obliquely to some design. This was Timbucto.

  Claimer despaired for a moment at the loss of Jump Hill. It was exactly right—the eye was led, as he had just been reminded, from the jumps up the hill. Even the spondaic meter of the name Jump Hill conveyed a stepping up. Too, too bad.

  The new name was burned into a wooden sign hanging by chains from a deep post. There was an ugly stone trough, as big as a bus, set off behind the tree, as if for the feeding of some Yeti. A sculpture, no doubt. Ah well . . .

  When Claimer parked the car in the lot in front of the management office—the sign said COMMUNAL CENTER—there was a man standing in the walk, his face unseeable within the tunnel of the fur-edged hood. He greeted Claimer with an extended right hand and Claimer saw that it was his son.

  He repressed the urge to ask him if he’d escaped. “Pall,” he said.

  “River Phoenix died last night,” his son said vacantly. “We’re all a little fucked-up—worked up—about it here, you know. Like, you can’t believe it.”

  Like, I can, thought Claimer, but he said, “Who?”

  Pall took his father’s bag and headed up the walk.

  “You know, Dad,” said Pall as they reached the door to the communal center. “You used to mock the guy. The name is Phoenix. River Phoenix. Some James Bond thing you’d do, remember?”