The Silent Woman

After a wretched, wakeful night, my hot head buzzing with annoyance, I sat squirming in my study waiting for Ollie to arrive. At nine he put his head in, smiling with his usual greeting, “How are we doing, Andy?”

I said (as I’d rehearsed, tossing in bed), “I’d rather you didn’t call me Andy.”

This was a week or so into our arrangement, his acting as my research assistant.

“But it’s your name, dude.”

I stiffened and said, “I’m Andre to my readers. Andy to my friends, Mr. Parent to everyone else.”

“Like, aren’t we friends?”

Looking puzzled, Ollie slouched into the room and sat on the sofa. And that was another thing. I had not invited him into my study, I had not given him permission to sit, and, maddening to me, he began, head down, to pick at a magazine on the coffee table, which I found boorish and intrusive.

Nor had he removed his bulgy black wool hat, which enclosed his head like a toque and gave contrast to his pale face, pinkish in spots from exertion, or maybe affront. He sat forward, teetering slightly at the edge of a cushion, knees together, plucking at the magazine with slender fussy fingers, paging past the story I’d published in it, my admittedly egotistical reason for it lying on top of the stack.

I believed that everything about Ollie Pirkle could be explained by his being twenty-two years old and just out of college. Audacious—a word he liked—he might have replied that everything about me could be explained by my being seventy-six. But never mind my years; I was then and still am a reasonably productive writer, most of my books in print, and I was contemplating a new book, an unusual one for me, for which I needed help. I was planning a novel based on the early working life of George Orwell, when he was still unpublished and gauche Eric Blair, employed as a policeman in Burma, five years doing a job he later admitted he “thoroughly disapproved of.”

I advertised for a research assistant at the local college and asked each applicant the reason for their wanting it. Ollie’s answer was the best.

“One of your novels was withdrawn from a course I was taking,” he said.

“Really—why?”

“Curriculum-based trauma. Trigger issues. Objectifying women.” Ollie had a lovely ironical smile. “It made me want to read it.”

“Sixty years ago, that’s why I wanted to read Henry Miller.” The name meant nothing to him, so I said, “What do you think of my book?”

“I downloaded it. I’ll let you know when I’ve read it.”

Ollie wanted to be a writer, he said—a wish that made me wary—but what worried me more was his answer to my saying, “I’d need you to do some intensive research.”

He said, “Sure—as long as I don’t have to go to a library.”

I was too shocked to laugh. I said, “A library is where books are found.”

“I can find stuff online.”

“All of it?”

“Why not?”

He did not know that George Orwell was a pen name. He had not read 1984, though he was aware that it was a novel about the future—which he found hilarious (“Like, nineteen eighty-four was almost forty years ago!”). But he used the word Orwellian with confidence, to describe oppression and despotic government control.

I explained my book. This was the man no one paid much attention to, the almost unrecognizable Eric Blair, the young embarrassing policeman—embarrassing in later years to Orwell himself—like an antihero out of Kipling, a rogue in uniform, flourishing a swagger stick, drilling his native inspectors, and ordering beatings and arrests. Blair the colonial, the womanizer others called a poodle-faker, and—though secretly, silently doubtful—a servant of the 1920s British Raj. It was an experience so intense and shameful he resigned and, atoning, became a dishwasher in Paris and a tramp in London. Ultimately, with a name change he was the ascetic left-wing anticolonial pamphleteer and prescient novelist who called himself George Orwell.

I put Ollie on probation and challenged him with an assignment. “I need you to assist me in finding details of his life as a policeman.”

“I can do that.”

“He wrote an essay called ‘A Hanging.’ I suspect it took place while he was posted to a prison, a place called Insein, not far from Rangoon. See what you can scare up.”

Ollie busied himself in the upper story of my garage—so-called carriage house—where I’d set up a desk and a printer, working at his laptop, while I continued my narrative, writing as usual in longhand in my study. Within an hour he’d downloaded Finding George Orwell in Burma, which of course I’d read—the physical book in my study.

“Good on the present woes in Burma. Excellent on topography. Thin on the past. Nothing about Orwell that isn’t in the biographies. Also, a bit tendentious.”

“Meaning?” 

“Look it up.”

But he dug deeper; he brought me pages from a colonial officer who’d worked at the prison, some anecdotes of a High Court judge who’d visited prisoners there, including some men in the condemned cell, and, last, his triumph, an aerial view of Insein Prison as it looked in 1925, a great mandala wheel, corridors as spokes, the cells ranged along the periphery of the rim.

Smoothing it on my desk, he said, “Says here it’s a panopticon, whatever that means.”

“‘All-seeing’—Greek.”

None of the biographies mentioned that the prison in Burma was a panopticon, nor its connection with Jeremy Bentham and Foucault, nor—importantly—its relation to the Orwellian concept of surveillance.

“That makes sense. The watchtower in the middle of the thing—all the cells are visible.”

“Like Nineteen Eighty-Four. One person can see everything. Big Brother. Orwellian.”

“Bingo.”

He impressed me by adding that before looking for the Insein material he’d read “A Hanging” and remarked, “What I really liked was the prisoner sees a puddle and steps aside, so he doesn’t get his feet wet. And he’s, like, going to his death.”

“That’s the hammer stroke,” I said. “You’re hired, Ollie.” 

“Cool.”

The radical transformation seemed to fascinate Ollie greatly, especially Blair the old Etonian bullying the Burmese and boozing in the Gymkhana Club, the “Shooting an Elephant” years, the shortest and least-detailed chapter in any Orwell biography, usually based on misleading descriptions in his novel Burmese Days. That tall skinny callow youth, just about Ollie’s age, had power and responsibility and a gun and a whip, a pukka sahib, while Ollie was—what?—inexperienced, still living with Mummy, with all the presumption of someone who knows nothing of the world. Aren’t we friends was a perfect example of that.

“I’ve known you, I guess, a week?”

“Ten days,” he said, looking down, still flicking at the magazine. “I started on the fifteenth.”

Hating the fact that he was avoiding eye contact—but it was his way—I said, speaking to his wool hat, “Friendship takes a little longer than that to ripen. It is earned through trust. You’re my employee, Ollie. And I’m many years your senior. Perhaps a little formality is in order.”

He closed the magazine he’d been slashing at as I gave this sententious speech. Then he looked at me, with a slight smirk. “I can’t get past your name.” 

I resisted reminding him that his name was Ollie Pirkle. I said, “Parent is French. Properly ‘Poronh.’ It’s Quebecois, shortened way back from Parenteau.”

“What do you want me to call you?”

“Have you heard of a writer called Robert Frost?” 

“Yes, but I haven’t read any of his stuff.”

“A wonderful poet,” I said. “When I was about your age, I saw him walking down the street in Amherst, where I was a student. I ran into a nearby bookstore and bought his latest collection of poems, In the Clearing, then followed him into the Jones Library and asked him to sign it.”

“And, like, did he freak out?”

“No, he signed it. But my point is I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Frost.’ He was in his eighties. I was twenty-one. He seemed to me a shaman, an enchanter, shaggy-haired Tiresias in an overcoat, squinting into the distance. ‘Thank you, Mr. Frost.’”

Ollie went silent as he shrugged; it seemed to me his generation didn’t know how to apologize, because they could always download reasons to believe they were right.

My life, my work, was ruled by routine. But Ollie had no routine—he was often late, he was sometimes early, he squatted like a monkey on his chair before his computer and would have missed lunch most days had I not signaled to him that it was time to leave for the café in town. He had poor table manners, he sat askew, he picked at his food with his fingers, he never took off his wool hat, he played with his phone as he ate, he was like a small child. But there was a sweetness in his disposition, a vulnerability obvious in his pallor that gave me concern. His intelligence had never been seriously tested. The fingers he used to eat with were delicate and graceful—South Indians ate like that off a palm leaf; and with the softness of a small child, he seemed somehow oddly edible.

One day, out shopping, I bumped into a prof from Willard who said, “I see you at Grumpy’s these days in the company of an epicene young man.”

“A good kid—really smart,” I said, insulted by the description. “My research assistant.”

But the recondite word nagged at me and led me out of curiosity that evening to look for my copy of Jonson’s plays and reread Epicene. I had it in my study the next day when Ollie came in to deliver some notes.

Seeing the fat old book open before me he said, “Any good Blair stuff in it?”

He couldn’t imagine that, embarked on my writing project, I’d be reading about anything except Blair or Orwell.

“No—it’s a Jonson play. Epicene.” 

“Like, Doctor Johnson?”

“Ben Jonson, the playwright.” 

“Two Johnsons—cool.”

“You majored in English, Ollie, and you didn’t know that?”

“I majored in creative writing at Willard—a great program. And I guess there’s a ton of things I don’t know.” He was not chastened, he was a Gen Z nonapologist, delivering news. He tapped his phone. “But I can always find out.”

And later that day he said he’d found the whole play on the internet, and read it—“But I skipped some of the boring speeches”—and was thrilled by its invention and its jokes, especially the charade of the marriage, the substitution of the character Epicene in the marriage. “Like a kind of transgressive rom-com.”

With that he started out of the room, but remembering, turned and added, “That amazing subtitle, ‘The Silent Woman.’ And the word epicene is awesome, not effeminate but both genders at once.”

“I think it means effeminate.”

“You’re wrong. It means both male and female. Except in some cases the woman is silent.”

You’re wrong was an impudent expression I naturally resented in any context. But I checked the definition—it, too, was Greek—and it meant possessing both male and female characteristics. Ollie was right. And I admired his curiosity and diligence, how he’d taken the time to read the play and respond, as he had with Orwell’s “A Hanging.”

I have mentioned that he was like a small child, and in many ways, he was—impulsive, clumsy, innocent of the world. That made me protective toward him, but I was also protective because he was so resourceful, so helpful to me in my project. He found diaries and letters of old Burma hands, he introduced me to books of Burmese fauna and flora, he unearthed a memoir of an opium addict Blair had known in Mandalay, one Captain Robinson, also a policeman, who’d become a Buddhist monk to kick the drug, and when that failed, he’d attempted suicide. But his pistol slipped and instead of blowing his brains out he’d blinded himself. George Orwell had favorably reviewed the memoir in 1942.

“Crazy family.”

He meant Blair’s French grandmother, Madame Limouzin, who had lived most of her life in Moulmein, and Blair’s louche uncles, one married to an Indian, another to a Burmese, and Blair’s half-caste cousins, despised by the British, one for being a chee-chee, the other a Chutney Mary, belittling words that Ollie found online and taught me.

“Check this out.”

It was a photograph of tall smiling Eric Blair the policeman in a group photograph of his fellow policemen in Mandalay.

“And compare it with this.”

Another photograph, this one of George Orwell, the combatant in the Spanish Civil War, fierce, unsmiling, Trotskyite, anticolonial.

“It’s like two different people.”

“Yes, Ollie. That’s what interests me. His experience in Burma as a sahib with servants turned him into his opposite, initially a dishwasher and a tramp, and for the rest of his life being free. He said something like, ‘Freedom of speech is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.’”

“That blows me away,” Ollie said, and he faltered, covering his face with his pale hands and murmuring beneath his fingers in a prayerful way. Taking a deep breath, he recovered, dropping his hands. “Like, how did he explain it in his autobiography?”

“He didn’t write one. And he tried to prevent a biography from being written about him. Needless to say, he didn’t succeed. There’s a dozen of them.”

“What about you? When are you going to write one?”

“Someone once said that Malraux’s books were messy and conventional. But his life as an adventurer and cultural celebrity and poseur was a masterpiece. My life is not a masterpiece.”

“What is it?”

“Messy and conventional in part. Episodic and reckless and filled with bad decisions. I once wrote a story, ‘Two of Everything,’ how I had two lovers, two houses, two countries. Now I can hardly claim one. Henry James said, ‘Live all you can.’ Foolishly, I took his advice. I overdid it, owing to my ardent and irrational esurience.”

Ollie stared at the word esurience leaving my lips.

“Look it up,” I said. “And you?”

He said, “My life, like, hasn’t really started.”

Ollie left me with that melancholy thought. I resisted telling him that when I was his age I was in Central Africa, living all I could, and along with its excesses it gave me something to write about. And later my marriages, my son, my failures, the wreckage, and, as Borges said, my supreme solitude in old age.

I was immersed in the past; he was peering into the future. He talked about living; I thought constantly of dying. It was a pleasure to be with someone who didn’t complain about ailments and ill-health, someone so casually life-affirming.

He reminded me that I was out of touch with the present, that the world I’d known had moved on. But he was ignorant of the past, the names of recent presidents rang no bells, Vietnam was a name he knew, but a blur. Speaking of Orwell and religious fanaticism, I once alluded to 9/11.

“I was born that year.”

Apart from my books, which he’d begun to read, he’d read almost nothing. He’d never traveled, he couldn’t drive, and it was only after working for me for a month that he’d moved out of his mother’s house into an attic room in town. “I need it for my sanity—my family’s a serious obstacle to my mental health. Kind of like Blair’s, I guess. Or yours.”

He mentioned the books of mine that had addressed the subject of dysfunctional families. And I was reminded again of why I’d hired him—because he held my work in high regard, and I was vain enough to be grateful to him for that.

Still, he unearthed helpful material, details of the sort of uniform Blair the policeman would have worn, information about the Burmese nationalist movements, the street entertainments known as pwe, the food, the weather, and what timber company had probably owned the elephant Blair had shot in Moulmein.

Ollie lived online. It was his mode of being. For meals, for shopping, for games. His friends, he said, were online. As a nondriver he found his rides online. The internet was a conduit to his brain and his being. He lived with that odd presumption you might mistake for asceticism, without physical books, without paper, sharing but always presuming he’d find what he needed—food, rides, information, and, I suppose, love. It was not asceticism, it was an effortless—a privileged—existence. Princes lived like that. His computer was his tool for writing: He said he wrote every day.

“Want to show me something you’ve written?”

“I finished a piece, about ten pages, but I’m not happy with it. It seems tendentious.”

“Here’s what to do. Get a pen and some lined paper and copy it out, longhand. I guarantee that after you recopy it slowly you’ll find it improved.”

He laughed and said, “Write the whole thing like this?” making a silly scribbling gesture, helplessly wagging his hand. “That’s too much work.”

“Writing is work, Ollie. I order you to do it.”

He did, he struggled, he had poor penmanship, he wrote mainly in block letters, like a first grader. I didn’t read what he wrote but I glanced at a page and it looked to me like a long, semiliterate ransom note. That was a surprise, that he’d never learned to write properly in longhand, but apart from that he was without any surprises. That was what it meant to be young—to be unsurprising, to live in that princely way online, tapping out commands. While for me, at my age, nothing was new. My fingers were ink stained, I was weighed down by experience, some I’d never off-loaded, as I told him.

“Like what?”

“Like the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen I found in a bar called the White Rose in Vientiane. I walked in and saw her surrounded by about eight other women. I walked up to her and she took my hand and led me to her room.”

“Just like that?”

“It was during the Vietnam War.” 

“That again. So what happened.”

“I must draw a veil over what followed with the Silent Woman.” 

“Ha!”

“But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.” 

“You’re full of these great quotes!”

“What’s that about votes?” I said and turned my good ear to him.

“I think you’re going deaf, Mr. Parent.”

Stating the obvious was another of his traits, characteristic of the presumptuous young, as a child will say, You have a big nose.

“I’m not deaf—deafness is silence. I hear a hum, a buzz, I hear you speaking in your particular voice, but I don’t always understand. You say, ‘My suitcase,’ and I hear ‘Buy toothpaste.’ But that’s the least of my infirmities. Please go find some more Blair, Ollie.”

Even given his pallor and occasional languor, it was shaming to have a young robust man around. His good health intimidated me and sometimes depressed me, like an obscure and indigent writer being in the presence of a best-selling author, outshined and envious and resentful, and reminded of their failure.

It is also in the nature of being twenty-two to be self-absorbed, but this was exaggerated by his online life, always facing a screen, which made him supremely inattentive to me when I was anywhere near him.

To get his attention I’d say, “I’ve been told I have the face of an apostle.” When he didn’t glance my way, I’d add, “I have rarely made a rational decision in my life.” Then I’d give up.

Over lunch, I told him that I sometimes drove to New York City to see my editor. I knew the location of every rest-stop men’s room for two hundred fifty miles. I woke twice a night for a bathroom break. I often stumbled, I had trouble hoisting myself out of the bath. Cataract surgery had left me with “floaters,” and so out of the corner of my eye I might see a rabbit or a rodent or a blown leaf, which was in fact a floater in my aqueous humor. I’d lost most of my hair, many of my teeth, my arm strength, my mojo. I was cursed with anomia, my memory for names impaired. “He was in that movie”—and of course Ollie didn’t know the movie, but he’d find it on his phone. Certain words eluded me. “It’s a French word, it’s often used with hieroglyphics, it means a sort of oblong frame.”

Ollie tapped his phone. “Cartouche.”

After almost two months, I realized that he’d found all the essential Blair material and knew Blair well enough to say that, as a single man in Rangoon, Blair had been at times esurient. But I’d embarked on my book; I didn’t need Ollie. Actually I did need him, but it was tedious to have such a young man around all the time—his bad posture annoyed me, his awkwardness made me impatient, I hated his silly hat. Long ago, when I’d been a teacher, I kept my job because I felt I was learning from my students; and when I stopped learning, I knew it was time to resign. I had never looked back.

What did I want now? I wanted more—not sex, not two of everything, but a nurturing friendship, an awakening to something new, an adventure, a revelation, a thing I’d never known before, truly life-affirming and surprising, relieving my loneliness and offering me hope, something that I could believe in, that would make me as happy as writing always did, to stop me thinking about death—to be more than entranced. I craved to be exhilarated.

Ollie was useful as a researcher, but it was the first time in my life I’d spent with an employee so young. I began to regret that I’d admitted him to my life. I had learned quite a bit from his searches but personally, he held no surprises. He was a drudge, the humming unstoppable circuit of the internet passing through his body. It pleased me that this circuit allowed him to discover details of Blair’s Burma. He said it was all a revelation. He’d never been lacking in presumption, but he said he was more confident now.

“Empowering,” he said, which made me smile. “I feel I’ve grown. I live on my own now. I’m my own person. Thank you, Eric Blair, for becoming George Orwell. Thank you, Mr. Andre Parent.”

Yet I could not detect a difference. He looked the same as when he’d said to me that he’d be my research assistant As long as I don’t have to go to the library—a sentence I still found astonishing.

One lunchtime at Grumpy’s, I steeled myself and said, “Friday will be your last day.”

Ollie nodded his thickly hatted head but hardly looked up from his phone. That seemed another trait, his manner of acceptance—that he was naïve and yet unshockable, from years of soft landings and safety nets. He knew he’d find another job in this era of labor shortages.

Friday came, I’d had another bad night before, wakeful, hotheaded, wondering if I’d made the right decision, resenting the thought that I’d be alone, writing my book, solitary meals at the café, probably bumping into the Willard prof who’d ask, “What’s become of your epicene friend?” But it was the life I’d chosen, and I’d been reminded many times of what a selfish beast I was, locking myself in my study. But a writer was a selfish beast, or else there was no writing. And the writing life was compatible with, of course—nothing.

I heard the car in the driveway and knew it was a taxi from the sounds of its impatience, the peculiar swerve-crunch of driveway gravel, the loudness of the door slam, the hurried departure.

And here I was squirming again, as on that early day of I’d rather you didn’t call me Andy. I took a deep breath, knowing that he’d put his head in to say goodbye, before going to his cubicle in the carriage house and working his last day head down at his computer.

I’d left my study door ajar and was facing it when it creaked open wider and a person leaned in—not Ollie, but a pretty, young woman, with dark shoulder-length hair, reddened lips, and hoop earrings. She wore a short linen jacket over her white blouse, stylish jeans, and yellow sneakers.

I was startled for a moment, then I saw my mistake.

“Ollie.”

The long lustrous hair swished with the head shake, the earrings danced.

“Come in.”

A graceful movement, a dance step to the sofa but not a word. Silent but smiling.

“Sit down—please call me Andy,” and I struggled to my feet to welcome her, exhilarated.