The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  Now, seeing Camp Kingswood again—leaves gone from the trees, you could see the old bunk houses, and the lake beyond, the lake calm, flat, and steel-gray in the autumn chill—I found myself telling Seana about how, starting with my first summer there, I’d fallen in love, not so much with Maine’s lakes or coastline, but with its trees, the evergreens especially—pine, hemlock, juniper, and, my favorite, Norwegian spruce.

  What I’d loved about Maine, I said, was what I’d come to love about Borneo, even though the two landscapes had hardly anything in common, and that was how thick and deep the forests were, along with my sense that they were still—evergreen and hardwood here, tropical forests there—the way they might have been millions of years ago.

  I talked about the different kinds of mangroves in the coastal regions of Borneo and how their root systems looked like tangles of swollen spider webs, and I talked about peat swamp forests, and how they could burst into flame spontaneously, or be set on fire by people clearing them, and how the fires could rage over hundreds of acres for months at a time and were almost impossible to extinguish because so much of the burning went on below ground, in the deepest layers of the peat. And I talked about forests I’d been to on my most recent visit to Kalimantan—Dipterocarp forests—probably at the same time Seana had been moving in with Max. About every four years—I’d been lucky enough to be there when it happened two years before—the onset of dry weather conditions, combined with El Niño, resulted in an extraordinary explosion of color, where tens of thousands of trees in these forests, many of them a hundred and twenty or thirty feet high, and any single one of them bearing four million flowers, burst into bloom. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

  “Four million?” Seana said. “You counted?”

  “Estimated,” I said.

  “But these trees are dying—they’re being logged away to make room for your palm oil plantations, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Palm oil was used in the making of napalm, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you are a shit,” she said.

  “Probably. Still, I was wondering if you’d like to visit the forests with me and get to see them before they’re gone?”

  “Sure,” she said. And then: “‘ Death is the mother of beauty,’ right?”

  “Max used to say the same thing—a line from a poem, right?”

  “‘Sunday Morning,’ by Wallace Stevens—I heard the lines from Max the first time too. But you say you don’t feel guilty?”

  “About what?”

  “About taking pleasure from seeing the beauty of these forests because you know they’re dying.”

  “What good would guilt do?”

  “Actually,” she said, “and take it from an Irish girl who knows about such matters—when it’s not self-destructive, guilt can be a splendid muse.”

  “In some places I’ve been to in Borneo,” I said, “there can be more than seven hundred different species of trees in a twenty-five acre plot, which is more than the total number of tree species in the United States and Canada combined.”

  “Impressive.”

  “It’s one reason—being able to get to Borneo easily and often—I’ve stayed at the job in Singapore.”

  “And you’d go there—to Borneo—if you knew you were dying, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Seana was quiet for a while, after which she said she’d come to the conclusion it would be a good idea if I was the one who wrote Charlie’s Story, that she liked listening to me talk—to what she called the sweet, innocent timbre of my voice—and that maybe I could make this voice work on the page.

  “I’m not as smart or talented as Max,” I said.

  “Neither am I.”

  “Not so,” I said.

  “Well, who knows, Charlie?” she said. “But you do have the main thing most writers begin with: you loved to read when you were young. Because no matter what other reasons writers may give for why they write, most of them, in the end, will tell you that what made them want to be writers was that they loved to read when they were kids, and that they wanted to be able some day to write books that would be for others like the books they’d loved when they were growing up.”

  “Max used to say pretty much the same thing when people asked him why he wrote,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Seana said. “And your father said you had a great thirst for advenure, right? So what could be more of an adventure than making up a story—creating a world that never actually existed, and peopling it with imaginary people you come to care about more than you often care about people you know, and all the while—all the while, Charlie—never knowing what’s going to happen to them next?”

  “When you start writing your novels, you really don’t know what’s going to happen to the people in it?”

  “No,” Seana said.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  “Some writers—Nabokov most famously—claim they always know what’s going to happen next—that a writer is like an omniscient god who controls the destinies of all his characters.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said.

  “That’s because, despite a sometimes useless habit of being more innocent and timid than is good for you, you’re an essentially unique, adventurous, and playful young man,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Neither of us are as playful as your father is, though.”

  “Not yet anyway,” I said.

  “‘ Not yet anyway,’” she said, repeating my words, and when she did she looked away so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Then: “Don’t you think that’s sad, Charlie?”

  I wanted to say yes, but instead I answered her question by telling her that the blossoms in the Dicterocap forests were pale and dusty, and looked something like hibiscus blossoms—wide, flat, and fringed like crepe paper, and the color of blood oranges—and that their leaves were light green and fleshy.

  “Every four years, did you say? Which means that in two years we can go there, you and I—book a trip together, yes?”

  “Is that what you writers do—book trips?”

  “You’re not that funny either,” she said. “But sure—I’m game to go.”

  I told her it was a deal, and explained what I’d learned on my trips there: that the massive flowering of the trees, and the fruiting that followed, had been a gift to the animals, especially to wild boar, who thrived on the seeds and spread them everywhere. I said that nobody knew how many centuries local populations had depended on those times when there was an abundance of seeds—and lots of pork to gorge on—but that anthropologists believed the relationship had lasted for as long as human beings had inhabited Borneo.

  What I didn’t say was that most scientists had concluded that logging had probably reduced the density of the forests below the critical level needed to maintain reproductive cycles, and that the ecosystem was, therefore, irreparably damaged.

  When we got to Tenants Harbor, I telephoned Nick’s parents—his mother answered, a lucky break—and I said I was in the vicinity with a friend and would like to stop by. Mrs. Falzetti said to please come, but to give her a half hour or so to tidy up. Seana was surprised I hadn’t called from Northampton, and I said I’d waited until we were nearby because I didn’t want to give them a chance to reject a visit out-of-hand, which I figured would have happened if Lorenzo, who could be nasty at times, had picked up the phone.

  We had some time to kill, so I drove us out to Port Clyde, a few miles away, and we walked along the boat landing, where the ferry to Monhegan Island docked. The air was crisp, near freezing, but without wind, and Seana slipped her arm into mine. The ocean, like the lake at Camp Kingswood, was steel-gray and calm, but I knew how changeable the weather could be—how a pearl-gray sky could turn to slate-black within seconds, and how winds could become ferocious and waves could come roaring in and swamp small boats.

  “Did you ever spend time here with Nick, just the
two of you?” Seana asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Once—a total disaster—when we stayed with his mother and father. And I visited him and Trish a few times after they were married. For a while—before they were married, when the three of us would come up here together—I thought I might settle in these parts—not in a town around here, but on an island off the coast, where I could be totally alone and wouldn’t have to see or talk with anyone.”

  “There are people around,” Seana said. “Still, it is peaceful and lovely here. Maybe Max and I can rent a house here for a few months—it would be a good place for getting work done. No distractions.”

  “Except for Max,” I said.

  “You never said how Nick died.”

  “You’re right. I never said how Nick died.”

  “Do his parents know how he died?”

  “I assume so. The embassy called from Singapore, and I called too.”

  “And what did you tell them?” Seana said. “And can you stop being such a tight-ass with me about it? Is there some deep, dark secret here?”

  “No,” I said. “Just stupidity. Nick could be incredibly stupid sometimes—a real stupid son of a bitch. A lucky son of a bitch too a lot of the time.”

  “But not this time.”

  “Not this time,” I said, and I told her what had happened: how, on the first Saturday night after I’d returned from Borneo, he got drunk at a party he threw in his apartment.

  “He was showing off,” I said, “and I was out on his balcony—I was pretty plastered too, and busting his chops—and he came at me, and I managed to step aside at the last second and he couldn’t stop—miscalculated—and pitched over the railing. His apartment was sixteen stories high.”

  “And…?”

  “And I tried to catch him—to grab him—but it was too late, of course, and when I sobered up, I went to the morgue and ID’d the body—puked all over the place, and over Nick too. Projectile vomiting, like a baby…”

  “Good,” Seana said.

  “Good?”

  “A vegetable kind of justice.”

  “I thought you’re not supposed to say bad things about the dead.”

  “Why not? Given the way you and Max talk about him, it sounds as if he got what he deserved, including your leftovers.”

  “Sure,” I said. “The way you got Max’s leftovers, right?”

  “You can be nasty.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, I do like that in you, Charlie,” she said. “But tell me this: given your dislike of Nick’s father, along with your claim about not being affected by guilt, why the compulsion to pay your respects?”

  I was ready for her question, and said that Nick had been an only child, same as me, and that all through my teenage years, and occasionally since, I’d imagined what my father would feel if he had to watch my coffin being lowered into a grave, especially if it happened at a time when he was without a wife or live-in girlfriend, and when I’d told this to Nick, he said he’d had similar thoughts about him and his father, but that there was nothing for me to worry about, because knowing Max, he bet that if Max were single when I kicked off, he wouldn’t stay single long.

  “I’m with Nick on that,” Seana said, “but imagining what people will feel after you’re dead—that’s ordinary self-serving stuff we all indulge in now and then. It doesn’t account for why we’re making this trip.”

  I said that even though Mister Falzetti was a lousy piece of work, it was still something to lose your only child, and that there was this too: that after Nick died, I kept remembering what Max said once when he’d come home from the funeral of a colleague’s daughter: that the rabbis taught that although there was a word for a child who lost his parents, and for a husband or wife who lost a spouse, there was no word for someone who lost a child, so terrible was the loss.

  “That’s the mush side of your father’s brain talking,” Seana said. “Sentimental crap. When he gets into his rabbinic groove, spewing homilitic pap, I head for the exits.”

  “You’ve never had a child to lose,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So how would you know what it’s like?”

  “Loss is loss.”

  “I don’t buy it,” I said. “There are losses, and there are losses. They’re not all equal.”

  “And imagination’s imagination,” Seana said. “It can go anywhere and feel anything. You don’t have to lose a child to feel what it would be like to lose one.”

  “Methinks she doth protest too much,” I said.

  “Give it a rest, Charlie,” she said.

  “What I think is that if you’d ever had a child yourself, and if…”

  “Goddamn you!” she said, and whacked me hard across the face with the back of her hand, then walked away, fast.

  I caught up to her, grabbed her by a shoulder, and turned her around. “Hey—!” I began, but before I could say anything else, she wrenched her shoulder free and pushed me away.

  “I gave you fair warning,” she said. “I gave you fair warning, and I’ll do it again. Don’t you ever talk to me like that. Don’t you ever, ever talk to me like that, do you hear? I’d have made a good mother if I’d wanted to—a damned good mother.”

  “I agree.”

  “Prick!” she said, and she drew back her hand to whack me again, but then let it drop to her side, and walked off toward the near end of the boat landing.

  Neither of us spoke again until we were back in the car and were approaching the Falzettis’ house. The house was large, and set on a slight rise that overlooked a small fishing harbor that contained one of three islands owned by Andrew Wyeth and his wife. The Wyeths’ island was set in the mouth of the harbor and covered about twenty acres, with a beautiful old lighthouse at one end that the Wyeths had used as their home before they’d bought two other islands in the area, and before they’d moved back to Pennsylvania. I told Seana about the Wyeths, and suggested that if we stayed a few days, we might visit their other two islands, which were much larger than this one—four to five hundred acres each—and that Wyeth’s wife had turned these two islands into wildlife refuges where local fishermen could base their operations.

  “Thanks for the good news on the environmental front,” Seana said, and she punched me on the arm, lightly. “So okay—here’s what just happened: because I’d convinced myself you were tougher-minded than your father, I became momentarily disillusioned—upset with myself—for having been blind to the squishy regions of your sensibility. You were right about Max, though. He’d be a distraction.”

  When Nick’s mother opened the door—she was a short, compact woman with light blue eyes that, like Nick’s, were almost translucent, and gray hair that had a hazy purple sheen to it—I hugged her and told her how sorry I was about Nick, and as I did I recalled that the first time Nick invited me to his parents’ home we were halfway through a meal she’d set down for us before I realized she was his mother, and not the housekeeper.

  Mrs. Falzetti said it was good to see me again and that I looked wonderful, then wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. I introduced her to Seana, who had been one of my father’s students, I said, and—the story we’d contrived on the way north—was on her way to a writer’s retreat near Acadia National Park, and (but why was I surprised?) Seana said something sweet and appropriate about it being impossible to feel what it would be like to lose one’s only child.

  Mister Falzetti came to us then—“Call me Lorenzo,” he said at once, and I hugged him too, which seemed to surprise him—his body stiffened—and told him how sorry I was about Nick, and that Nick had been my closest friend and had always looked out for me. Mister Falzetti was wearing a navy-blue blazer, a powder-blue mock-turtleneck, gray flannel slacks, and white deck shoes. I’d first met him at a UMass homecoming football game nearly twenty years before, and he looked the same now as he had then: lean, strong, and, in his yachting outfit, though without a captain’s hat, what my father would have called ‘natty
.’

  He looked at Seana then, and seemed taken aback that she was there, but recovered quickly and spoke to her in his usual cold, confident way: “You’re Seana O’Sullivan, aren’t you,” he said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “I’m an admirer of your two novels,” he said, and he led us into the living room, which was handsomely appointed in a soothing combination of contemporary furniture—sleek plastics and stainless steel—and antiques: an oak sideboard, a large French country table, rush-covered ladder-back chairs, electrified oil lamps, and, around the room, discretely placed, a dozen or so model ships, some of which, I knew, Mister Falzetti had made: fishing boats, sailboats, steamboats, ocean liners, and fully rigged tall ships like those you see in pirate movies.

  If you’d met him in this setting, or in the home Nick had grown up in, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an upper middle class suburb south of Springfield—the house in Maine had been the family’s country home until Mister Falzetti retired and they moved here full-time—you would have thought he’d probably gone to Harvard or Yale, and had been the CEO of an old-line WASP corporation. But it wasn’t so. “What my dad does is to turn shit into gold,” was the way Nick had described his father to me. Mister Falzetti had grown up in the North End of Boston, one of nine kids from a poor Italian immigrant family, and had started out, at fourteen, digging sewer lines for a company in Newton, after which, when he was sixteen, he’d moved to a small, mostly Polish farming town in Western Massachusetts where he set up his own business—mowing lawns, plowing driveways, pumping out septic tanks. Though he never finished high school, he was a fanatic about education—the one thing, he liked to say, the bastards can’t take away from you. And when it came to smarts—Nick loved quoting him on stuff like this—being a Wop among Polacks was like being the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. By the time he was twenty-one, he owned his own company, which pumped out shit and sludge from people’s basements and septic systems, dug up their leach fields, put in their sewer lines, and plowed and repaired their driveways, and he’d also been able to corner lucrative contracts for school bus routes, waste treatment operations, and road work—salting, plowing, repairs—in a half-dozen Western Massachusetts towns.