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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566892537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2011 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A SMALL PRIVATE PARK that Akiko has transformed into a scene from The Tale of Genji extends beyond the house; it has a broad path that leads to the public trails, thickets, a wetland, a lake.
I run from our house into the public land in the mornings, often alone, in the early light. I can run for over an hour without hearing the hum of city traffic. This early in the day, there is something more than royal about this domain: it is mythical. I run toward the past — not my own past, mind you, but a distant, primal past. A past in which my own infancy, or the current lousy state of affairs, or even the great city beyond the bluff — is unimaginable.
Today when I return to the house, I see the lights are on in Akiko's studio. This means I will find a thermos of fresh green tea waiting for me on the kitchen counter. A sweet gesture, considering how evasive I am with her. Akiko has come to confuse my evasiveness with a retiring nature. In her words, I am "the silent type." My silence conceals a wealth of worlds best left undisclosed.
We have been together ten years. Long enough for my idiosyncrasies to have faded into invisibility. Akiko, too, has faded. She is the white noise I have come to depend upon and possibly cannot live without. Akiko is witchy, clairvoyant. Her astonishing dreams are astute, surgical. They keep me on my toes. This marriage of ours puts us both at risk. She is in danger because I lie incessantly and the habit of these lies has blunted her gift and confused her. Love has caused her to distrust her own intuitions. Yet I am in danger also, because I cannot help but offer her clues. It is inevitable that sooner or later I will falter, offer one clue too many and in this way bring us both down. When I fall, she will fall with me. Perhaps this is a comfort of a kind.
CHAPTER 2MY PRACTICE BELONGS to a shelf in the Devil's Kitchen. Insulated, above suspicion, I take my pleasure and am sustained by the sorrow of others. Their carnality. The ceaseless ebb and tide of human inconstancy, negligence, cowardice.
* * *
In the world I know, everyone is betrayed sooner or later.
The Practice is not of my own making. I mean: it is an inheritance of a kind. I have wandered its maze since infancy. I do not know another way to live. I often wish I did. The Practice is the inevitable extension of my own private dilemma. It is lethal, and yet without it I would perish. Assiduously, I portion out its poisons. Assiduously, I orchestrate the days. Like a game of chess, the Practice proposes an infinite set of circumstances. Or, rather, not exactly infinite. For I begin to — and this admission is terrifying — to see how redundant, how compressed, the games are.
My clients are thwarted, famished, and lonely. Inevitably, sooner or later, I seize upon and penetrate the one who has wanted this from me from the first instant. Or has taken time but has come around to wanting it. For a client, fucking the doctor is always perceived as a triumph. Although I am always curious from the start. In this way I am made. If the client is attractive I cannot help but wonder: is she/he fuckable? An outrageous determination. And yet: fucking is the one determinism. The one inevitability. In this way it is exactly like death. You know you'll fuck, be fucked; you know you'll die and maybe be murdered. And maybe murder.
I've known transcendent sex, but its promise frightens me. The risks of delight are immense. The infant feeding at the madwoman's breast, slipping deliciously in and out of slumber, is fiercely smacked. Smacked when he sups, he is quickly weaned. In no time he has learned to suck up, bite, and wean. Always watchful for the hook, he travels deep into the world of men with his deft set of sharpened tools. He will become a hoodlum, a maniac, a soldier; he will become a priest, a prison guard, a cop. A dogmatist, a patriarch — decidedly a public danger. He will become a psychoanalyst. He will have a Practice.
He will learn to dissemble. He will laugh like a wolf. He will cut through the city streets like a blade through water. His realm will be the streets, their secret stores of pleasure, their secret doors (I have a drawer full of keys!) opening to wondrous rooms, unfamiliar rooms, shabby rooms. He is attracted to, appalled by, shabby rooms. The street boy's spare depot, the shopgirl's cluttered cheese box, the saturated confusion of the drag queen's aviary, her floor slick with hairspray and powder. (He must take care to shed these scents, to kick the dust up behind him before returning home.)
* * *
Unlike a female client, a man in a wig, a boy smelling of malnutrition, are not likely to hire a lawyer.
* * *
In recent years I have pretty much neglected Akiko. These days we live in something of a parallel universe. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of her strolling the garden in her dreamy way. Sometimes she vanishes for a week or more. My wife displays her work in distant cities where it is apparently much appreciated. As it should be.
There are times when I admire her imagination. The autonomy it assures her (and I so needful of company!). Day after day she paces her studio with her scissors, the glue pot, those images she has culled from all times and places. She's like a creature from a fairy tale, my Akiko: beautiful, ethereal, living much of her life alone with her scissors and, in silence, piecing scraps of paper together.
Always she returns from her journeys with stories and presents for me. Rare netsuke, for example, although I have so little interest in aesthetic devices.
CHAPTER 3I LEAVE CLUES BEHIND both purposefully and inadvertently. Inadvertently because I do not wish to be discovered; I do not wish to hurt Akiko. There is a self within me who longs, at least from time to time, if more and more sporadically, to live a simple, tender life. Or, if this is beyond my powers, to engage the interstices with discretion, without harming Akiko. Yes. Without bringing her to harm.
Purposefully because I long to be discovered as I always have, since infancy, to receive the punishment that is my due. To risk annihilation. I court annihilation.
Deception is tiresome. It begins to seriously leech my resources, my strength, my powers of intellect, my time. And because there is a self within me who would crush Akiko's gentle neck. Who knows? Perhaps one day we will die together in a conflagration. Our own conflagration in a world that everywhere is burning.
* * *
Recently I made trouble for myself with a shopgirl. Such women are shameless; they are under the erroneous impression that other women, women like Akiko, are not. One will not disabuse them.
She could be my daughter, this overheated wench worthy of Wycherley. (She'd play Lucy, the buxom lady's maid.) Neurotic, cummy, self-aggrandizing, a braggart. I should know better. The new girl Friday to my wife's framer. My clairvoyant Akiko hated her on sight, whereas I couldn't take my eyes off her. We eye fucked straight away. The transaction ended badly, with Lucy spilling coffee on Akiko's portfolio. For this she was fired, if only briefly. Later in the week she called my office and begged me to intercede in her favor. As Akiko — in an unprecedented temper — had taken her business elsewhere and so could not know, I did as I was asked. Lucy triumphant, therefore, a thing I could not help but profit from. Her little deed amused the cad that dwells within. It should have ended after an afternoon's burn between two evildoers, but I was hooked. Encounters such as this enliven the days. And so the thing persisted.
Lucy was like a spoiled child; we played hard together. She teased me, she needled, she longed to see our house, Akiko's and mine. She hungered like a little cat for a taste of the fish set out upon the master's table. And so as soon as Akiko was away — clear across the country — the cats did counterfeit domestic bliss. (I should add that, if Lucy's transparency amused me, her needling also hardened me against her. Within the interstices, her place would always be secondary.) I knew our setup would floor her. She would be envious; she was. When I saw the green cinders leaping from those malicious eyes, I feared I had, once again, gone too far. (As when fucking the little blonde who does our taxes.)
We tumbled around the house like pandas. I spun her like a top. I rolled her about this way and that. We managed to despoil every room and knock over a small red lacquer box, although the house is sparely decorated. I knew enough to keep her out of the studio, but when she saw a large collage suspended above our bed, she raged: The bitch doesn't deserve all this! At that instant I could see her a decade down the road: flushed, fighting fat, bitter.
She needed soothing. I made her a kir, got out the snacks, and then, at night's fall, took her to the marriage bed.
Lucy was mollified by this ultimate betrayal; like Scrooge McDuck, a rainbow, a pot of gold spun above her head. I let her dream although I planned to dump her; she was — I could see it — pretty crazy, possibly borderline psychotic. I feared — and rightly so — an unregulated nature. It would be a job to manage the affair. I began to worm my way out of it.
As we cuddled and whispered together into the night, I revealed my sorry life; the doctor's life is not his own. Clients all in danger of collapse — or worse — from one moment to the next. The midnight calls from the hospital, fire department, or police. I made it clear our time together was possible only because of an unusual synchronicity: Akiko's opening in New York and the departure of a client, recently terminated and who had left for Australia where he intended to start up his own practice devoted to a thing he knew from the inside out: the misuse of infants and children by those who are depended upon for protection.
Lucy began to weep, poor, winsome brat! In her early teens an uncle had been inappropriate. I told her she was fortunate it had not happened sooner.
"Not sooner!" she surfaced like a porpoise from the foamy sheets. "So later is O.K.? Fuck that! Fuck you! I can't believe you said that!" Yet when I made to lick her tits she sighed and yawned, needful of a pre-dawn nap. (It is she who broke the shell; I am sure of it!)
* * *
The minute Akiko returned, she knew something was amiss. She barely touched the take-out sushi, artfully presented, but roamed the house mumbling that it looked odd, it felt odd. She wondered if it had actually shifted, if ever so slightly, on its foundations. Had there been a small earthquake? A torrential rain? And then she found the shell. A precious shell from Indonesia, spotted and pronged; a thing I'd never paid any attention to. It was a rarity, and now it was broken.
For a time Akiko wore an irritated look; a furrow appeared on her lovely forehead. I must admit it turned me on. The oddest things do.
CHAPTER 4THE PRACTICE IS CONTAINED within two home cabinets situated at the entrance to our property, but my clients do not know there is a house beyond, nestled in the woods; Akiko's studio, as well, is invisible. Perched upon the edge of a small ravine, both appear to soar above the canopy. From within our rooms, Akiko notices and points out to me the deer, the snowy owls, and seasonal hummingbirds.
The home cabinets are well rooted to the ground by a stone path and garden, all of Akiko's design. My wife is addicted to perfection and adheres to a dogmatic system both ancient and alien to me. And beneficial. In terms of my need to dissemble, she is my greatest gift. The cabinets are impeccably set out. They are spare and they are superb. Each has its own waiting room. The cabinets both open to a hallway that leads to my own private library and office.
One of the cabinets I call Spells. I cannot enter it without my heart beating faster. The other I call Drear. If Spells is devoted to the pleasures of transgression, Drear belongs to all the rest: Lutherans, a defrocked priest, a wafer-thin old maid, a psychopath who has bungled more surgeries than he has toes, the retired night watchman who squanders his pension on whores and whose wife of forty years is suing for divorce. There is also the CEO of a local company undoubtedly responsible for my city's dramatic number of birth defects, a college professor — the most tedious of the bunch — who drones on and on about a lost inheritance and his wife's dismal affair with the family dentist. (There was once a young scholar I took a fatherly interest in and who managed to elicit real tenderness.) (Do not think me incapable of tenderness.)
Sometimes a client will move up from Drear to Spells, even after many years. There was an actress once, as rageful as a bloody axe, who over time was soothed and then began — it seemed miraculous — to flourish. One day I saw how beautiful she had become, how vigorous, how eager for the world and its delights; how desirous, also, of transgression.
I invented an excuse, claimed Drear needed to be reconfigured, and moved her to Spells. There I allowed her to seduce me: "I always," she told me on her knees, "wanted this." The affair triggered a shift in her expectations and charisma; she landed a major role downtown. That was ten years ago. And if her roles are now less glamorous, she still invites me to opening nights.
Spells is the theater where my clients and I break all the rules. And this under the banner of Mindful Subversion, Convulsive Beauty. What happens here is stunning, somehow always unique, if orchestrated. I never forget that I am dealing with people who, despite their determinisms, their needful tenderness, their pride, can at any moment decide to kill me or call their lawyers. And so Spells is oiled with solicitude and sweetness and the infinite capacity that seems to be mine to convey that each transgression is unprecedented.
To assure this impression, I have at times and after a period of months or weeks, revealed a previous violation many, many years before when I was green and still vulnerable. Such a revelation convinces the most skeptical of my good intentions, my passionate interest in them, and the anomaly our love affair represents. The lady in question, now a mistress, will assure me that my secret is safe with her, as safe as she believes she is with me. The affair remains circumscribed within the process of recovery.
I do not accept gifts — apart from the little love gifts, so like those of high school girls, I simply cannot refuse. I explain that because our lovemaking is an extension of our work together, the fee will be the same. In this way I become my client's whore. Yet I always manage to act professionally. My infatuations are in the service of knowledge. My clients love this! We fuck in the stellar radiance of knowledge and love. I am enamored of my profession.
The women are intelligent, sexy, neurotic, funny, inventive, feisty, sprightly, and they are in need of me. They do yoga, tai chi; they are in fine fettle and in great shape. They play tennis; they go to the sporting club. They get massages and go to botox parties. They are as sleek as seals.
The men … this is more complicated.
CHAPTER 5BACK TO AKIKO.
* * *
My wife sells her curious work for astonishing amounts of money and so receives the bounty of my friendship without ambiguity. I do not "support" her and yet I do provide security, a sense of belonging, of having a place in the world. We are, after all, a couple. It never occurs to her that, as she cooks glue in her bower, I am extending the meaning, the expectations, the boundaries, and even the vocabulary of the therapeutic relationship. At the end of a long day, as I enjoy the raw oysters she has provided for my benefit, the Fanny Bays I especially appreciate, I think, I always do: Why tell her? Why torment her?
And yet there are those times I would grab her by the hair and spit it all up in her face. Her pleasure in our life sending me into a rage difficult to contain. In these moments I must drop a clue or else explode.
I tell her about a female patient's sexual interest in dangerous men; a beautiful woman, milky skin; a strawberry blonde. I watch for signs. My wife puts down her fork and grows very still.
I tell her about my concern for this patient's safety. I see Akiko's nostrils flare. My wife is gentle, rational. Coolly she says, well, of course you are concerned. This is what your work is all about. Your deep concern. For other people.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Netsuke"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Rikki Ducornet.
Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
“Sex and psychosis are indistinguishable in this killer new novel from Ducornet. . . . [A]s fascinating as it is dirty and dark, . . . the plot is impossible to resist.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.”—The New York Times
“Judging by her new novel, [Ducornet] has not lost ground. . . . Netsuke, a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism, still has power to shock, maybe even to appall. . . . Our society is numb to explicit depictions of sexual acts. The perversity, decadence, even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there’s pathos too.”—Boston Globe
“’When the very air of one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air,’ ponders the narrator of Port Townsend author Rikki Ducornet’s brief, fervent novel Netsuke. . . . Written in lyrical, sensuous prose, as if shrouded in a fog of humidity, Netsuke emerges as a character study of a man in crisis.”—The Seattle Times
“[Ducornet] writes novels in delicate, precise language. . . . [Netsuke] is an introspective study of the life of a bad man—or is he a man who just keeps making bad decisions?—who can't stop abusing his power.”—The Stranger
“[A] finely crafted object of a novel . . . . Ducornet weaves a complex tapestry of various and repeated colors, textures, and designs. . . . The total effect is simply remarkable, an austere yet somehow lush beauty. At times this chilling tale seems neo-gothic, reminiscent of the work of Patrick McGrath, though much more compact. Ducornet has the extraordinary ability to compress an explosive tale of violence and repression in a small, tight container. . . . [W]e are simultaneously repulsed and entranced as the disturbing but gorgeous story accelerates to its foregone conclusion.”—Rain Taxi
"Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet's passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon's knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets." —William Gass
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.”—Joanna Scott
“There is the time before you open Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke and then there is only the time in which you are reading—a searing present of heart-swallowing secrets, warped eroticism, betrayals, and insight trellised against the page in nightshade-gorgeous prose.” —Forrest Gander
“Linguistically explosive. . . . Ducornet is one of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation
“Ms. Ducornet writes with velocity, immediacy, and impact. It only takes a few pages to be caught up in the mind of the doctor. . . . This story has some fascinating insights and no-holds-barred language that is reminiscent of the work of the famed psychoanalyst and author Irwin D. Yalom’s novel, Lying on the Couch. Though the doctor couches all of his actions as empathetic and for the “good of his clients,” his real intentions are as transparent as glass. He is like a feral cat that has been put in charge of the hen house."—New York Journal of Books
“Rikki Ducornet travels . . . literary terrain with an assured, lyrical voice that consistently fascinates.” —Los Angeles Review