Stella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this loose sequel, set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks off their engagement, Stella throws herself into a tough South Chicago teaching assignment. The roughness of the classroom comes as both a diversion from her disappointment and a test of her bleeding heart. On the rebound from Blake, she falls into an impassioned, exhilarating liaison with Peter Clavier (P.C.), a psychologist-activist whose uncle—a pastor—has long prophesied for Peter a future of otherworldly greatness. As Stella draws out Peter’s past, the novel forks paths for a time, following P.C.’s trajectory from a Cabrini-Green childhood to surreal stardom in the orbit of well-funded radical politics.
Nearly forty, Stella fears her fertile years are numbered and risks pregnancy by sleeping with Peter. When, during Covid, the test shows a plus sign of a different kind, Peter swears off all politicking for a quiet private family life, though he chases a chance to run for the office of local alderman. Keeping her worries about P.C. mute, Stella pushes him to D.C., insisting that their baby should not derail his worthy ambitions. She returns home to her parents in search of steady ground but finds instead her father, Regan, hosting meetings that mix nostalgia and conspiracy in the cleaned up basement coal room. A visit from a dark web celebrity galvanizes their amateur crew in a direction that Regan rejects but tolerates. Stella must reckon with the paradox of a father whose basement existence fades into an illusion when he climbs the stairs to care for his grandson.
When Blake reappears, she wishes she could recover their romance, but Chicago and Peter and her child have changed her. Almost against her will, she seeks a father for her colicky son. Although Stella is still attracted by Blake’s wounded innocence, she now and again falls back in with P.C., whose doubts grate against his own ideology even as, in D.C., his boss hands him a marquee microphone. One of Regan’s friends discovers Stella’s involvement with an “enemy,” while P.C. weighs the worth of strategic violence.
***
Joshua Hren’s new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, releases today. We’re happy to share the following excerpt with FPR readers. This scene is set when Stella and her son have moved back into her childhood home, and, as the seasons shift, she is beginning to find her bearings.
The gaining of leaves was also a loss. Always celebrated as the end of cabin fever, spring put a stop to the art of survival—the little rituals she and Dad developed—and demanded more than distant waves to neighbors jutting from cars to doors. She had entered the winter’s subtler meanings as she hadn’t been able to since childhood. Sweet-anise tea dried from the shoots he’d grown last year and kept in the basement, steeped three times until the taste was so faint all they sipped was a shared warmth that somehow kept off the claustrophobic closure that came when she did not leave the house for days, rocking like Nonna in the creaking chair, sipping the anise while Jason nursed, the motion a lull that could carry the years so that she could be seventy and still here.
Yet this season meant too the front yard maple would hide those rigid and fragile branches that had defied death for six straight months, would hide such stark beauty in favor of the kind that pleased too easily, too readily for her. She missed the tree’s fingers extravagantly pointing in every single opposing direction as if to say Look everywhere but not at me! How she could never be. She missed the steam from her mouth as she sang to Jason in the drafty room and she missed her Dad who now spent nights—when the boys weren’t there—tinkering outside.
Retreating to the kitchen’s bay window—that ever-open unblinking eye bereft of blinds or drapes because the backyard was walled by pines and fences overgrown with tangled braids of weeds and vines (she did not know the difference)—she inhaled hard at the sight of the morels—the “black foot” mushrooms that she’d pinched her nose at as a child before her father bent down and, his patience to her impatience, identified them with wonder and care, praising the fine hairs that finished the cap ridge and (while picking) admiring aloud the underground sclerotia that could store needed nutrients even when the climate waned extreme (she’d later come to find them still standing, more than stumps even into November, when everything else was closed-door dormant and blanched and even the cumulonimbus coughs seemed to cover the earth with death’s last gasp). “Scare it?” he had asked, and she had shot back “Sclerotic”—sending his chin up, serenity threadbare at the stubbly fringes—“It’s like Nonna who lived through it all. Hardened. Rigid.” “Sounds morbid. Where’d you learn that word?” “Mrs. Wick.” “Glad to see they’re keeping your eyes on the evergreen future at that school!” he grinned, pretending to tackle her down to the ground and then pointing out the crescent of morels that fed on the death of the old apple tree. “You can pick them,” he said, and though her fingers first tapped at the tops of the mushroom with hovering, lightly treading repulsion (he’d later warn her of “false morels” which, if you ate them, could conclusively kill you, a fact which made the good ones taste better instead of giving her double vision). She came to love the pluck because the cap from stem broke quietly—as if the snap was as if meant to be, not as if you were severing the heads of a crop that had been bred only to look pretty dying. Dad had helped her with the harvest when a bumper of them came, held out like a trampoline his rust-colored T-shirt and she tossed in a dozen and tossed and tossed and they bounced but settled and soon he was standing, rubbing his hands, bent over the shoddy gas stove that sometimes leaked and reeked up the house but now sizzled the foraged sclerotia, coated with half and half and cornmeal and fried until the delicious black caps were browned all-around. As she chewed and swallowed with relish and milk she again explained about sclerotic Nonna as if he’d been interrupted for only a few seconds. “Not that grandma is mean at all—no not at all that’s not what I mean.” He stepped in when with trepidation she mouthed the rest but refused to say it. “Ah, I see, more this: there’s a hardening that has happened on account of having to because of all she’s been through. But the thing about the mushrooms’ sclerotia is that they seem done-in but are really only dormant, storing all the needed nutrients until a less bad environment can come—and then, like they’d done no more than damn blink—the things start growing and nourishing again.” “But what if the less bad environment don’t, won’t come? See. All that good nourishment stored up for what?” He picked up a small cap and dipped it in buttermilk and held the dripping treat out to her: “For you!” Stella nodded though she said nothing. She chewed and stood and felt the pan with her finger first. Finding it cooled, she touched her tongue to the bottom, finishing the refuse of the needed nutrients.
The faint taste of those mushrooms in her mouth, she sat at the table and licked a little envelope. Well-fed, she took out the unsheathed check Peter sent. Her hands had to work hard to extract the extravagance—the wealth that arrived so unspeakably thin, shocking when you saw that the figures were not forged.
She ripped it into a hundred some pieces, and started to brush them into the shaded white void. The heads of zeroes fell into their grave and she inked his P.O. Box on to the outside. Her mouth had joined with the number of nothing, O, O, O—No, No, No.
(In college her professor had had the class memorize T.S. Eliot for extra credit. “Extra credit. Though I’m paying you. Like an I.O.U. promise with dirty money interest.” She had never understood what he meant. But she did recall the Four Quartets—)
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark, And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors, And cold the sense and lost the motive of action. And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.
O God, please, another obscenity, another obscene amount he sends me—more than any mom could manage to spend even on high-end diapers and organic peach pablum siphoned into petite recyclable jars, as if begging to be set aside in a trust fund so that Jason in spite of the supposed odds would become the legendary trust-fund baby, would have enough for a house as a freshman in high school, a yacht by the time his friends were salvaging second-hand beaters from Fyodor’s Repairs (the Russian mechanic had given her a deal, a steal on the busted Renault axle she rattled to death that scarecrow night). The payments, which arrived through a foreign account, had started to feel like hush money, though his image no longer appeared in the Times or a thousand Twitter feeds in every direction, saying Look at me! wherever you looked, urgent and omnipresent for a few slow-motion minutes and then half-forgotten as the page was flipped or the tab, the epitome of mutability, clicked off into the abyss of ether, the fans that cooled the internet servers sighing an infinitesimal sigh as they’ve one less task to keep alive. But whatever the national deficit of attention, his face had been flashed with due frequency—“a lie told often enough becomes truth”—was it Mao or Lenin, not Trotsky, who said it?, that she could find, through a Google search, a hundred images of a man she did not recognize (wearing suits that telegraphed a perfect admixture of authority and cool), that he was not the man whose sweat she had tasted, whose sperm had swum a baby into her belly: he was nothing if not what was called a celebrity.
In the letter he sent separately from the foreign check, return address a P.O. box, and his words slanted at the opposite angle she knew came natural, his handwriting worse than ever—hard to decipher even with the magnifying glass dad used to inspect the morels—he’d confided complaints that seemed at first indulgent, until she came to the page where he picked his own qualms apart—what a privilege it is to have made it so far that I could take issue with the trials of fame—a level I thought I knew before, but now I know I knew nothing. What it’s like to have people you don’t know follow your every word and hate every syllable they say you said, with ninety-nine percent of the world not bothering to check the difference between paraphrase and calumny, plagiarism and the real-deal me. The old joke of authenticity doesn’t sell well as a commodity. The hardship of folks I don’t and won’t know dropping my name and dissecting my doings, what it’s like to have people who weigh your motives be about as qualified as the mind-readers at the circus. To say nothing of those who celebrate the hate the other side has for me—it’s a shit-show, see? Until each side starts seeing in the being of his enemy exactly what he wanted to be. But the worst is this: half those words are scripted, fed, and I’m the great masticator who chews them up and spits ‘em back out even when I only half agree. At first I found, what can I call it, virtue in the cause, sacrificing self for the cause, at a high cost, because it’s always possible to have qualms of conscience when you aren’t the captain of your soul, but I can’t, now that I’ve seen some things which I can’t spell out, complete the mission. I wish I could explain the new digs, the new operations, the nature of it all. Suffice it to say that my influence increases even as my public profile fades into a forgotten has-been. Bliss, really, to be done with interviews, to reduce lectures to little venues where the stakes of what I say won’t keep me up insomniac anymore. All of which is to say, Stell, that it would be weirdly safe, now, to have you and baby here. My son must
He had sent the letter unfinished, unsigned. She did not cash the check—whose country of origin she could not identify, though it seemed Eastern European, maybe—but tossed it in the first bonfire of spring in the backyard pit where the mushrooms cooked in the cast-iron skillet on the ashes coaxed from coal, from compacted plants that died a million years back and still had the everlasting lust for life.
When Dad took his paycheck to the bank to cash it and the paper was handed back to him, “bouncing,” she, six years old, reached to feel if the thin strip was made of rubber, to rub its texture and see if it erased things like pencil edges. Outraged, her father declared, “Crooks,” pocketed the paycheck and passed the ford of carpet to ascend upstream where the bank’s attendees waited to serve him, “A family can’t afford this shit,” shaking the check in the air, he followed, “doesn’t it mean what it claims to mean?” the bank teller telling him kindly that the company had declared bankruptcy. He said it. Shit. It was the first he said the forbidden in public, published what was liberally leaked in little grunts daily, dividing the devout heart of his daughter, who knew two ways of being, right and wrong, from the beginning, and knew then that he trusted her whether or not he loved her.
When they slumped violent against the leathery Ford seats, he reached out and pressed the cigarette lighter, letting its coils color orange and kissing it to the corner of the check. Red rings coiled into a faint blue glow, as though a child had scribbled terrible strokes of crayon into the air—and, as the smoke accumulated, father cracked the window, the window!, only slightly, as though suicide were already written in the will, in the genes which were science’s version of what’s his name Calvin’s what’s it called predestination. He rubbed his charred hands on his blue jeans and said, “Sorry darling,” as she coughed and her eyes cried of their own volition as a manner of protection more than mourning. “What this means for our family I can’t say aloud.”
Image Credit: Jasper Francis Cropsey, “Autumn – On the Hudson River” (1860) via Wikimedia Commons
