Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  The Sunday New York Times, here at six in the morning, to stay the week until I can absorb the essays in the magazine, do the puzzle and the Double-Crostic, read the travel, entertainment, and ‘Week in Review’ sections; I am always at least a week behind in the ‘Week in Review.’ But I read the Book Review first, and note that Faith Sale, the editor whose judgment I questioned last spring, now has a worthy best-seller, Amy Tan’s moving and original The Joy Luck Club. Last winter in New York, after her publisher’s party during the National Book Critics Circle affairs, Faith pressed upon me the galleys of Tan’s book. I read it on the Metroliner going down to Washington, and loved every gentle, graceful word of it.

  Later I see in the Times that its paperback rights have been sold to Vintage for $1.2 million and I rejoice. For once the rare event, a good book appears on the best-seller list among all the adventure tales, mysteries, romances, science fiction, horror, and popular schlock. The author will make money, a great deal of money, it seems, and the editor will be celebrated at her house and all around publishing for her astuteness in acquiring such a good novel, and a first novel at that. For once, all’s well in this narrow corner of the publishing world.

  ‘There is no pain greater than being bitten by one’s own dog.’ I remember this astute sentence but cannot for the life of me remember who said it. Mark Twain, it may be.

  I am back at work culling material for this memoir from my notebook of last summer. At Peggy Danielson’s house in East Blue Hill, where I tried to bury all thoughts of my seventieth birthday, I found a prayer the sculptor Lenore Straus had used to conclude her book on the process of creating a stone statue, now standing in Norway:

  O God,

  hold my hand

  that

  holds the tool.

  Without using those precise words, I often find myself praying similarly before I sit down with my clipboard. Substitute ‘pen’ for ‘tool.’

  Peggy told me that in the last few days of Lenore’s life, when she was dying of cancer, she worked on tiny wax sculptures. Much reduced in size from her customary larger-than-life heads, these little figures contrasted significantly with her heroic stones, signifying not just the diminution in her energies but her sense of how little was left to her life. Never once, having been compelled almost to give up her hold on life, did she abandon her art.

  Louise Nevelson (in a book on her work by Arnold Glimcher): ‘In the end, as you grow older, your life is your art, and you are alone with it.’

  In a book on Zen Peggy gave me, I found Lenore’s AA card: ‘Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our teaching, ever reminding us to place principle before personalities.’ Useful admonition, not only to the alcoholic but also to the book reviewer.

  Reading Nevelson I come upon another statement by the sculptor: ‘You have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity.’ I expected she would add that the artist proceeds to pollute or pervert or degrade it by painting on it, but no. ‘And then,’ she writes, ‘you put your imprint on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.’

  And then she says: ‘My work is delicate; it may look strong, but it is delicate. True. Strength is delicate.’

  ‘Have a good time,’ someone says to me, hearing I am going away for the weekend. ‘Let’s have a good time tonight, and eat out,’ I say to Sybil. ‘A good time was had by all’ is the way social items end in little local newspapers in small towns. Good time. Ford Madox Ford wrote in New York Is Not America (1927): ‘It [New York] is the city of the Good Time—and the Good Time is there so sacred that you may be excused anything you do in searching for it.’

  I put into the storage bin of my head some new lingo I have just come upon in a novel about Las Vegas. In gambling, ‘drop’ is the total amount bid at a gambling table, ‘cage’ is the place you cash in your winning chips, the ‘pit boss’ is the executive in charge of a group of gaming tables during a work shift. And best of all, ‘toke’—a tip given dealers by a patron. One never knows when it will be necessary to use one or another of these words, in life or in fiction. They are fine Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic words, good to have in place of elaborate modern pseudoscientific jargon.

  I remember the pleasure I felt as a college student when I discovered the force of few words and the power of the monosyllable, that ‘a minuscule edifice’ was not as effective as ‘a little shed.’ In William Strunk’s mimeographed sheets which I first encountered at Cornell I found the instruction ‘Use definite, specific, concrete language,’ and an example: For ‘A period of unfavorable weather set in’ he suggested ‘It rained every day for a week.’

  December

  Once again I mourn the change of season. Into winter now, I think of loss of light, of deterioration of trees and gardens, of letting go of sunlight and water to swim in. In a dour mood, I thought this morning while I waited for coffee to brew (always a low moment in my day) of the things I once wanted, and hoped to have in my life someday: a sailboat, a swimming pool, a convertible. Until last summer when, feeling the ineluctable pressure of age, I recognized that these dreams will not materialize. May Sarton once wrote to me: ‘What is it I can have that I still want?’ My version of this is more direct. What I once wanted, I know now I shall not, ever, have.

  I’ve been rereading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and find I have marked in the margin:

  I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book [Pilgrim] is the straying trail of blood.

  That is what this memoir is: a straying trail of blood, with not much optimism that it will dry up and disappear, or turn to Hansel’s white bread crumbs that will lead the reader out of the black forest into light and hope.

  Today I heard a name, of someone older than I. It often happens to me. The name may be of a poet, an actor, a public figure from the past. I think: He must surely be dead because I have not heard or seen that name for a long time. Can he still be alive? Surprise. Then, pleasure. He has survived my ignorance of his existence.

  Beginning of a dark month of despondency. I am working on Camp, a novella about my thirteenth summer as an ‘intermediate camper’ (as we were called) at Crystal Lake Camp in the Catskill Mountains. It comes hard. When I see the light in the kitchen across the way, and know that Sybil is home from the bookstore and puttering around with food for our late dinner, I want to leave the carriage house and join her. But I’m not finished rewriting the section I am stuck in.

  I know why people choose occupations that take them daily into offices, shops, faculty lounges, stores, and theaters. They prefer to be surrounded by other workers, conversing, exchanging observations about the news, last night’s TV programs, weekend plans, family anecdotes, the everyday trivia that constitute life in the world.

  People like me sit alone from early morning to midafternoon, sometimes later (like tonight), confined to one-way talk with lined paper and a yellow-on-black display screen, and then with a white page called, inelegantly, a printout. The telephone is turned off. We are engaged in a one-way, solipsistic monologue. The sound of one’s own voice on the page grows tiresome; one runs out of things to say to oneself. The house is silent, the Holy Ghost, reputed to be one source of enlightenment, does not descend, the compost heap in one’s head stops ‘working.’ There is no one to complain to about this sudden, inexplicable dearth of ideas.

  After many years of such solitary confinement, I fantasize about being younger again, coming to the job I once had in an elegant townhouse on Nineteenth Street in Washington, D.C., walking to work in the fresh, bright, early-morning air carrying three plastic cups of fragrant coffee and three sugar buns, greeting Robert Myers and David Sanford, my friends at The New Republic, sitting in my little office that looks out on the washed street, eating, drinking coffee, planning, questioning, joking, gossiping. There was a satisfyingly warm, intimate air in the office, made up of the odors of recently showered and powdered and shaved editors, fresh cof
fee, crisp, unread galley sheets, and warm sugar buns. For the moment, in this place, at this time, all is right with one’s life.

  A warm early-December day. Sometimes December in Washington can have just such unusual days. Once, when the Modern Language Association was meeting here in the days between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we gave a small luncheon party out on our deck for friends who were attending the meetings. Everyone sat delightedly in the sun, in shirt sleeves and cotton slacks. Someone even complained of the heat.

  Today is reminiscent of that day, so warm I dream of spring coming tomorrow without having to pass through the dreaded winter. I take my clipboard across to the deck, and start to outline a possible short story. (By ‘possible’ I mean there is a slight chance that I will be able to bring it off.) Middle-aged writer, a good writer with a very small but persistent (over many years) critical reputation. For each successive novel gets very small advances, wins an occasional obscure literary prize. Develops a block, bad block. In this sterile period, a very young (twenty-seven) writer is published. First novel. Acclaimed. Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, half-million-dollar paperback rights sale, foreign rights too, movie purchase, etc. The horror: He has the same name as the hero. Some common name, like John Smith, Joseph Brown. Not even the grace to add a middle initial. In one fell stroke, a 190-page novella, in fact, makes an instant killing. Even if his start is too fast, too early, like spontaneous combustion, he is so far ahead of his namesake, with that one stroke, that the hero will never catch up, never regain his hold on his own name. Too little time left for him, too little desire. His block. Gives up entirely. Changes his name and goes to work selling books for a chain in malls. Defeated not by success (as his namesake might well be) but by two proper nouns.

  I get only so far, and then find it hard to go further with the skeleton, to stretch on a Procrustean bed a tissue of words. Sometimes I am stopped by an outline that is too complete. I think it would be better, safer, to dive into the beginning of a story, not knowing where I am going, and let it bloom, blossom, proceed by budding.

  I remember an opening sentence: ‘He lived alone with a daughter who had died and a wife who had left him.’ A startling opening, but so complete in itself that one would be unable to go a step beyond it.

  Other times I have been blocked by plain lack of experience, a condition not easy to believe of a woman past seventy. But still, never once in those years have I been homeless, not one night in more than twenty-five thousand nights. I have never been hungry nor missed a single meal, except by choice. Never dirty for more than a few hours. Very rarely very sick: I have lost no limbs, no interior organs, not even appendix or tonsils or adenoids. I have never been abused or rejected or (as far as I know) mentally ill. I went to war, was in the U.S. Navy but was never allowed aboard a ship. All these avenues of experience, and a thousand others, were cut off for me. I feel the absence, even though I think I remember reading that Henry James was able to write a story about Huguenots after glimpsing a family of them seated around a table as he was going down the stairs past their apartment. But my compost heap lacks some essential nutrients. How can I write? I ask myself, put my pen into the metal tip of the clipboard, rest my head on the back of my chair, and settle for a suntan on the warm, unproductive deck. I know why I prefer writing out of doors. If nothing comes, if I am unable to write a word, there is still some gain: the sun on my skin, which, despite every medical warning, I still love and indulge.

  Recently, waiting in line for a book sale to open, I heard about the exercise program of a fellow buyer. She told me she and her friends drove regularly to a vast shopping mall in Virginia in the early morning before the shops within it open. They stride rapidly through the enclosed corridors. From one end to the other and back: a little less than a mile. If they are feeling energetic they walk the route twice.

  I am aghast. In late November, to do some early-Christmas scouting for gifts, Sybil and I arrived at Tysons Corner a few minutes before ten. I tried to imagine taking daily exercise in those sterile halls, between walls of glass, stainless steel, and black protective gates, denied every natural odor of mossed tree trunks and pine cones or breezes from the sea, salt, fishy smells, wet dunes. I tried to breathe deeply only to inhale captive, stale whiffs of cigarette smoke, pizza and popcorn, sneakers and sweat suits, yesterday’s coffee and french fries. The air is motionless, an artificial compound of synthetic odors. For me, a mall represents the essence of the eighties, a plastic chamber of horrors, reminiscent of the feeling in Sartre’s play No Exit, devised for persons growing old in cities, shielded, for the moment, from polluted air, water, the failures of the ozone layer, and the damaging rays of the sun, and from the fresh morning of the spirit.

  The Library of Congress Reading Room, where I go on occasion to use its reference section, harbors some wonderful characters, so intriguing that often I am distracted from my work to watch them. There is a lady who calls herself the Bride of Christ. She dresses in white, surrounds her head with a thick white veil, and carries a wooden cross whenever she gets up from her seat to change her book. Passing behind her on the way to the card catalogue, I try to see what she is reading. I cannot tell; the book is upside down. Another middle-aged lady never takes her feet from the floor when she walks. She is called ‘the glider’ by the librarians. One can identify her passage without looking up by the long, swishing sounds as she moves about the room. I lunch with the librarian in charge of the reading room. Tori Hill is small, charming, tolerant, witty. She volunteers, an evening a month, to do the accounting work for Wayward Books. She tells me of a recent trouble. Yesterday a street person who spends the winter months in the reading room was found to be slamming his book on the lice he had picked from his hair. A number of such dead insects were then discovered in books he had used. She asked him to be de-loused before he returned. He was unwilling to leave. She was gently insistent. A guard guided him to the outside door.

  Dan Harvey, my old friend who is a distinguished publicist, calls to tell me that Richard died yesterday at home in San Rafael, California. I had spoken to him the day before. He was unable to answer me when his friend Zach put the phone to his ear. When I said I loved him and was thinking of him, I heard a low sound, like air forced from his throat and nothing else, but I believe he heard and understood me. I pray he did.

  I have a vision of his gaunt face and white hair across the atrium of the Fogg Museum last year, where we met for the university presses’ annual convention. A band is playing. Young, vigorous, smartly dressed press people are drinking champagne, eating shrimp, talking loudly, brightly, to each other. He is at the edge of the festivities, leaning against the wall, looking weary, but smiling to everyone who stops to speak to him.

  We hug, kiss. I try not to feel the unfleshed boniness of his back, his shoulders, his thin arms under his elegant silk suit. Richard, my beloved friend, is now reduced to a little more than half the size of what he was. He asks me if I think he has changed. I love this man and yet I can do nothing, not the smallest thing, to help him or save him from this accursed plague except silently plead with him:

  ‘Don’t die.’

  Out loud I answer his question: ‘Only that you are thinner.’

  Now he is gone, having entered what Freud called, in another context, ‘the splendid isolation’ of death. When I called him last month to thank him for my beautiful ash cane, he told me he had bought tickets for the Met’s new production of the Ring. ‘When is it?’ I asked. ‘Next April. Two tickets. Zach will come with me.’ This was after his legs no longer served him. I marveled at his optimism. Wimbledon and opera are his two passions. I prayed he would make it to the Ring as he had to the tennis matches. But no. His own Götterdämmerung arrived first.

  On the same day, I read the obituary of the Reverend James Sandmire, who died in San Francisco at the age of fifty-nine, of AIDS. He left ‘a longtime companion,’ a daughter in Dallas, a son in Salt Lake City, a father and two sisters in Oklahoma, anoth
er in Utah. He was a Harvard graduate, an elder of the Universal Fellowship, and a founder of the Metropolitan Community Churches in San Francisco, ‘which welcomed homosexuals.’ He tried to affiliate his church with the National Council of Churches, telling them that ‘the reason people come to our church is because they can’t come to yours.’ The National Council of Churches rejected his application.

  Christmas. Two days before, we left at six in the morning, and then waited almost two hours to leave the ground; the airport was crowded with planes in line before us. The plane to Portland came into fog, turned back to New Hampshire, landed, heard a new weather report, took off again, finally found a hole in the heavy bank of viscous cloud, and went down to land. We rented a car and made the four-hour drive north through heavy rain and, at the end, thick darkness that made it hard to find the road to East Blue Hill. It took us almost a day to come from Washington to central Maine.

  But then we were at Bob and Ted’s house in the woods. A huge fire burned in the oversized fireplace, dinner was almost ready, and Peggy, our hostess last summer for my dreaded seventieth birthday, came from her family dinner to have another dinner with us. We admired the tree that ‘the boys,’ as I foolishly call them (they are fifty-eight and forty-eight), decorated with moss, lichen, pine cones, and birch bark, and heard about their friend Bill, the real estate agent who wants to show us some houses in the area.

  Next morning, firm in our resolve to look but not buy—after all, it is far too early for such a change; Sybil has at least two years before she can retire from the Library of Congress, and the lease on the bookstore is for another year—we set off in two cars to look at property. It was a crisp, cold day, ice on the paths. I walked holding Bob’s arm. But the roads were amazingly clear, the air was bright, and sun shone on the black, bare limbs of trees. No one is about. The town’s streets, stores (those few that remain open in the winter), and fields were all deserted. Our little caravan was the only occupant of the roads.