KODIAK
by
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Jesse dresses quietly so as not to wake Kate. In the kitchen he fills a glass with water and gulps it down. His stomach feels as if it is going to erupt. But he knows the feeling. The price he pays for too much whiskey. He fills an old-fashioned kettle with water and lights the gas stove. He thinks back over the drive up from Boston the previous day. An exhausting eight hour drive in sultry 90-degree heat. The U-Haul van is still parked outside. He will have to get that back. He tries not to think too clearly about the future, about the risky move they have all made. Originally it was Kate's idea. But what did they have to lose? He boiled over whenever he thought of the bastard who had had him fired. After fifteen years! Fifteen years in which he had personally been responsible for over six million in accounts. The guys at the agency where he worked liked to go over to Maxie's Tavern on Friday afternoons after work to drink beer and talk. One Friday the son of the owner came along (that bastard). He and Jesse got into an argument. There was a push. A punch was thrown. It was over in thirty seconds. Jesse went home with a developing black eye. He told Kate that he had tripped and fell. At work on Monday nothing was said but the atmosphere felt poisoned. No one went to Maxie's that Friday. Two weeks later an organizational change was made. Jesse was told that the agency was moving in a new direction. He was given six months severance pay and his contributions to the pension fund. For nearly a month he had brooded. He lay awake nights plotting revenge. He would wait for the bastard to leave work. It would be pouring rain. Inside his raincoat would be the .45 which he had carried in the Navy. Kate said they should accept what had happened as an opportunity. She said that they could rent out the house and move to Crow's Neck and stay with her mother. It all made sense, she said. Jesse could write like he always said he wanted to and she could get on with her painting. Daniel might be a problem but they would have to convince him it was their only choice. Crow's Neck. Jesse pictured himself upstairs in the old bedroom on the second floor. There would be snow on the ground and wind would lash the window. In front of him would be a manuscript. He would wear a beard. When Jesse and Kate first met he had worn a beard. She was with a friend at a student hangout on Boylston Street. Jesse sat at a table opposite. His quick smile surprised her; overwhelmed her really. Everything followed from that smile. He seemed elemental to her like the wind or like the deepest part of a forest. His room was on the top floor of a three-decker in Dorchester. There were six others in the house, mainly students. The only furniture in his room was a mattress on the floor and a single chair positioned so that he could look out the window at an unruly sycamore tree. They slept together on their third date. Their passion for each other was so strong, so inescapable that the merest glance could set off a mad tumbling surge which left them gasping for air and groping for explanations. From those first furious tumblings they had projected a life. They would find some place in the Back Bay to live. It would have a skylight and built-in bookshelves. Kate would paint and Jesse would write. And how glorious it would be. Snow covering Commonwealth Avenue, their noses red with cold, summers at the beach in Gloucester. An endless litany of days and, most importantly, of nights. Nights together like explorers probing new land to the west. Daniel was born exactly nine months after that first night. Kate dropped out of the Museum School with two more studio courses and a senior project to finish. She said she didn't mind since painting couldn't be learned in class anyway. (It wasn't quite that simple: she wanted desperately to graduate so that she could show her father how wrong he had been to doubt her.) She did keep a foothold in the art world by joining an artist's cooperative. She showed her work in collaboration with the other artists in the group but beyond polite comments and encouraging words there were no sales. She accepted this. She joked about it describing herself as a housewife with big ideas. She said that the census needed a category like that. She figured there must be one disgruntled housewife with big ideas for every thousand households. Her studio was in an old warehouse down by the Fort Point Channel. The building was a veritable artist's warren. She wondered what would happen to her mountain of painting when she died. She thought about leaving instructions that it be torched. A bonfire, she thought. On Halloween. After graduation Jesse got the job at the agency through the University Placement Office. He was good with the quirky advertising campaigns that they promoted especially the catchy double-entendres which were a trademark of the firm. He was soon heading a working group and wearing pinstripes. He was in it, he said, for the ride. It was a bumpy ride at best. His rocket eventually self-destructed over a campaign which he staked his reputation on and which was unmercifully parodied in Ad Weekly. His group was dissolved. And then came that fateful Friday at Maxie's. As far as he could tell they could last a year on Crow's Neck on the money they had. A year, as Kate said, to give it their best shot. He would have to get started right away. Tea. A quick walk outside just to get the feel of the day. And then upstairs to work. He had a novel he had been working on for five years. He would finish that and go on to some other ideas. From the window he could see down to the harbor. It was going to be a beautiful day. He should send that little bastard a thank you card.
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About the Book
The story centers on three people: Jesse and Kate Drake and their sixteen-year-old son, Daniel. It begins in July, in Downeast Maine, on Kate's family farm and ends there just after New Year's. Kate is a painter/sculptor and Jesse a writer; Daniel is an unsophisticated sixteen year-old who is resentful and suspicious of their recent move to Crow's Neck from Boston. Kate's brother Jake and his wife Betsy live in the nearby town of Lubec. One evening, late, Daniel rides his bicycle home from town and as he rides past Betsy and Jake's place all of the lights in the house go out except for a light in the bedroom. Daniel watches, transfixed, through an open strip at the bottom of the blind as Betsy stops and shrugs off her robe. This leads to a relationship which ends when Jake, at a dinner party, proudly announces that at long last Betsy is pregnant. Jesse finds it increasingly difficult to write. His fear of failing, along with an increasing sense of his own mortality, pulls him outside, into nature, back toward his childhood dreams of the north country and the woods. One morning he takes a boat out on the harbor. A maverick gale blows up pitching him into the frigid water. This near-tragedy accelerates his longing for peace and surcease. Kate paints in a converted parlor on the first floor. Her energy and enthusiasm for her work generate tensions between her and Jesse. These tensions grow when, unexpectedly, a letter arrives informing Kate that two of her canvases have been sold to an important gallery in New York. The story ends here exactly at the point where the lives of Jesse, Kate and Daniel have come unraveled. There is a short epilogue in which Daniel, now older and married, returns to Crow's Neck for a visit. An unidentified narrator tells the story in the present tense. Jesse, Daniel and Kate's thinking form an important part of the narrative and there are short chapters in which their thoughts are the only form of discourse.
About the Author
Michael Philip Greeley is a mathematician (at the University of Massachusetts Boston) who has an interest in the imagination and its relationship to the creative act. His novel, Kodiak, explores this relationship through the consciousness of three members of the same family.