The Narrow Door
Page 8
2010 | By 8 a.m., I’ve tweeted about loggerhead sea turtles in Cape Hatteras, bears sunning themselves in suburban Los Angeles, happy potbellied pigs in Brooklyn, and plundered sea cucumbers in Mexico. I am perfectly content to find stories of animals. It is my morning project, the first thing I do after a first sip of coffee. I’ll find a few more links before I go to bed tonight. I scan dozens of news sites until my eyes are tired, until I can’t put off school prep any longer. I don’t believe there’s a one-to-one relationship between my animal project and Denise, though I wouldn’t be telling the full truth if I didn’t say my project took off around the time of her death. I love animals, but I have no grand purpose in mind. If my tweet about a rabbit makes you look more closely at a rabbit in a field: great. If it makes you look past a rabbit dish on a restaurant menu: even better. If not? I am not the rabbit police. It is the ritual of the search that’s important to me, the steady absorbing quality of the sorting, posting, passing on. I disappear into my project, dream into the forms of the animals I think about. For a little bit, I’m a turtle then a bear then a pig towing a drowning man across a lake to safety. The baggage of my human skin is a little lighter on my bones. We hear enough about humans, don’t we?
If I were twenty-three in 2010 and Denise were thirty, and we were both teaching assistants at Rutgers, I wonder if we would have become friends today. Probably. But would we have been on the phone three hours every night? I don’t think so. I imagine us sitting side by side in a darkish coffee shop, our faces purpled in laptop light. I’m tweeting, Denise is scrolling through Facebook. We’re in tattered armchairs, plum and gold, with holes in the upholstery. The room smells of dust, burned coffee, baked goods, candle wax, and old wood. A handsome bearded skateboarder walks in, sets off the bells on the door. We check out his skinny green pants, his thick brown beard; our eyes flit down again. Denise writes to five Facebook friends she doesn’t actually know: it’s mindless, oddly appealing work. Her tapping fills this corner of the room. There is so much less wanting on her face. The need can be spread out among many people, whom she writes to once a month. If Caitlin isn’t available, Denise can write to Johannes. I wouldn’t have to count so much for her, and she wouldn’t have to count so much for me. We feel the lightness of our arrangement, the freedom of movement.
From one friend we get immediacy, spontaneity, the exasperated voice, the shaken head, the occasional embrace. But the brain wants many friends, acquaintances. So much less to miss and mourn if there’s always someone else to replace the one you lost. One kind word means exactly the same as another kind word. The sweet relief of it. And maybe the brain has always known what’s best for us.
1987 | Who follows me out of the single gay bar outside Hyannis? He walks across the dark parking lot, without a word or a gesture, starts his car, follows my car as I drive south on Willow Street. I never even saw his face along the dance floor, where a lone guy in feathers danced too obviously, caught in some dream of himself, to the embarrassment of all six of us in the room. I should look in the rearview for the silent man’s headlights, but to do so would be to replicate some scene in Psycho. This is nothing so fraught. I am no Marion Crane. I suppose I could pull into Cumberland Farms, get out of the car if I wanted to, buy some grapefruit juice or cigarettes. But I’m too tired to head anywhere but to the motel, where I’ve been holing up all weekend to write. I’m trying to finish some stories, with the idea of applying to grad school for my MFA. In the past months, I’ve had two stories accepted by literary magazines as well as a grant from the state arts council, but it’s been hard to finish anything lately.
I turn right into the motel parking lot. Why am I not more shocked that his blinker is on, that he’s making the turn past the motel sign, with the orange letters and pale green backing? Is he staying here? Of course not. Until now, my car has been the only other car in the parking lot. No self-respecting gay man would stay in Hyannis in early April when Provincetown is an hour down the road.
I get out of the car. I walk back to the room, without looking to see what’s behind me. I slide the key into the lock, wiggle it, lock the door from inside. The room is silent, nothing but the taps and pings of the electric heaters. It smells of mold, but a pleasing, subtropical, Florida-vacation mold. Two drinking glasses in waxed paper sleeves sit beside an aqua plastic pitcher. All at once I feel an incredible exhaustion, and in due order, I unbuckle my pants. I kick off my shoes and socks, I pull off my sweater. I lie right down on the bed, naked but for my T-shirt, with the lights on.
The man stands at the window, with needy eyes, the droopy mustache twisted with white. I hadn’t realized that there was a part in the curtains, and I am too magnetized and stunned to get up and close them. He is mouthing some words: please, let me in, please. Maybe, like me, he’s someone who never does things like this. Maybe there’s a wife at home, and he probably wonders what she’d think of him if she saw him in this position: watching a young stranger jerk off on the other side of the glass. I wonder what Denise would think of me, too. She doesn’t think of me as a lonely person. She thinks of me as someone who is decent, loyal, sweet, which is why I shine those traits back at her. I wonder if her feelings would get cooler if she saw me right now. Maybe she’d start pulling away, calling less. The truth is she hasn’t been calling so much in the last month or so, ever since she and B started ripping their kitchen apart.
I lie there watching the man’s face as he watches me, until he tires of seeing what might be his own face transposed over mine-has the window become a mirror? He holds up his hand, presses it to glass, then walks back to his car. I pull the curtains closed. His handprint still smudges the pane. The car engine catches, and after a minute, I can picture the headlights drawing away.
2010 | The pond in the backyard of the Springs house is skimmed over with ice. On top of that ice is a coating of snow that hasn’t melted in weeks. The snow hasn’t really stopped since a few days before Christmas, and it bewilders me that anything could still be alive down there. But many things live here that aren’t supposed to live in this climate: the fig tree, the crepe myrtle, the needle palm by the door of my study.
Just where the pump flows back into the water, there’s an opening in the ice. What must it be like to look up through that opening, no wider than a foot or two? The smaller, younger fish draw to it, their mouths hitting the moving, wet surface as if they’re gorging on oxygen. Or maybe it’s nothing as extreme as all that. They’re curious. They want to see what’s up there, on the other side: the sky with its rushing clouds, the sun, the geese that fly overhead in groups of four. They want to see people.
But the older fish seem to think there isn’t any value in looking through that window. The world is cold and deep in these months, and they know energy needs to be conserved. They do what they can to turn away from that aperture, to abide the darkness above their heads. They know how tired they can get. They don’t need to know what they can’t have. They’ve seen light too often only to have it taken away again and again. For what is its purpose if only to show them what they don’t have? So they cradle near the bottom, in a mush of soft leaves, while the young ones keep tossing themselves up at that window above. They say, give us light. We want to see you.
1986 | Denise sends the revision to Iris. She tries to busy herself with all the chores she’s put off during these hectic months: putting up bookshelves, rearranging those bookshelves. She thinks about the next book and how she might arrange it. Maybe she’ll finally write the book based on her ex-husband’s colleague, Otto Krupp, the high school math teacher who stabbed the biology teacher forty-one times until she stopped screaming and fighting him off. But when she sits down to write, she can’t look at the screen without leaping up from her seat. Instantly she starts waxing the surface of her desk, and when she’s finished with that, she pulls the books down from one of those bookshelves and starts the tedious but involving work of rearranging them once again.
It’s not that she doesn’t
like what she’s written, but the doubts spread. If she’d held on to the book for a few more days, she could have made it a better book. She fears the news isn’t going to be good. She tries to list all the things that Iris might hate about it: Emily’s capacity to be wounded, Emily’s capacity to fall in love with people who manipulate her, betray her, leave her behind. Is Iris even thinking about the book, Denise wonders, or is she thinking about Denise, or more likely, a quality Iris doesn’t like about herself? She wonders whether she’s prepared to write this book one more time—or many more times. She thinks about that question as she beats pillows, does five loads of laundry, anything to resist the impulse to lie down on the couch, stare at the wall, and smoke half a pack.
Then Iris’s phone call comes. The voice on the other end is neutral, supportive, relaxed. You’ve done it, Iris says, with a tiredness that suggests she’s been up night after night with the book. She talks about possible edits: the opening, the ending, the passages from Emily’s mother’s perspective. We can’t help but wonder whether Iris’s tiredness is disappointment, or more troubling than that, a hunch she can’t even articulate at her desk, twenty stories above the Manhattan sidewalk, where the people below walk three times faster than they walk in Philadelphia. No, it is far too early to think dark things. Iris might not have her Good Deeds, but she certainly has a book she can work with.
Wave
2010 | In the past month: an earthquake in Haiti, an earthquake in Chile. Three debilitating northeastern snowstorms. A total of sixty inches of snow in Central Park, the snowiest winter on record. What can we look forward to next? Another earthquake or superstorm? The world has always been in some sort of frenzy, but in the past several decades we’ve fucked up the world. We’ve cut down the trees; we’ve burned too much oil; we’ve put ourselves in a position where we’re using more electricity than ever. How many tools are in our hands right now, iPad, iPod, iPhone?
The TV is soundless as I write this morning. I peek out the corner of my eye and go back to my laptop screen. I believe I am waiting for tsunami waves to crush the docks and benches of Hawaii, the little buildings around the harbor. Raw destruction: that’s what we want. A man running down a green stretch of lawn, a smaller man grabbing a tree trunk as water swings his legs up to the surface.
But a wave does not come without warning, as an earthquake does. Neruda: “I awakened when dreamland gave way beneath / my bed.” No, a wave is all height and density. We can’t hope for a weather front to block it. We can’t expect it to take a different course. A wave is absolute. A wave is the voice we can’t hear coming; a wave is the song of fire. We watch helplessly, but greedily, as the unaware still sleep in their beds, the animal cry of the siren filling up the dawn. And then a porch light trips on.
1987 | I’m not sure how I’ve ended up working as a technical writer, in an office park in King of Prussia, a full hour west of Cherry Hill, but it’s a relief not to stand in front of several classes of comp students, which is what Denise is doing these days. She’s decided that teaching is preferable to my full-time work week, even though I tell her about taking full advantage of my job’s flextime policy, about slipping down and out the back stairs without telling anyone. The truth is Denise is probably on fire in front of the classroom. I imagine her getting larger: a generous, challenging, tough, wise creature. I imagine her walking back and forth in front of her students, gesturing with her beautiful hands. She’s talking about Beowulf or Hamlet or The School for Scandal. Certainly she knows her students are in thrall to her. She can see the glint in the eye of one young man with thick dark hair; he always sits in the back, knees spread wide apart, the back of his head pressed against the wall. She makes sure to make eye contact with him; it is good to see that hint of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, before her eyes move on to the next person.
To have such charisma and control in front of the room! Whenever I teach, I am fighting the oncoming wave. I can’t even sit on the desk in front of them without feeling it on my back, the cold of it, purified from coming across a great distance at sixty miles an hour. If only those students in the chairs knew that I was never in AP English, that I hardly read books in high school, that I once got an F on a pop quiz on A Raisin in the Sun because I’d never even cracked the damn thing open, though we’d been talking about the play in class for two weeks.
Still, I like the people in my department. They’re smart, funny. They’re worldly. A motley mix, one is a former dancer, one is the former bass guitarist for a rock band. Even my boss is a former resident of the writers conference in Vermont. I’m sure this is why she hires me, as everyone’s title here implies the word “former.” But they make the former an entertaining place to be. Not that we don’t work hard, excessively hard. There I am, writing end-user notes for Real Property and Mortgages when I’ve never had a home of my own. Most of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. One of these days I’m going to be found out, and it will be worse than any infraction related to the study of English literature.
One day, on a business trip, a prospective banking client asks, is your background in mortgages and notes? I practically weep, no, Shakespeare! Oh, Shakespeare: Hamlet would know what to do with a question like that. It helps to set the alarm for five every morning, pull out my legal pad, prop the legal pad on my bent legs, and write in bed for an hour. Sometimes I can’t even read the sloppy penmanship when I get home that night. It looks like the penmanship of someone with a personality disorder. Still, the act of writing gives me permission to do that eight-hour day. It is a ritual, an act of stillness, of saying here I am to myself. No, I haven’t joined the ranks of former artists, though my coworkers might not exactly be aware of that. By the end of the year I have put together two stories I’m reasonably proud of, stories about an intense, expressive mother and the disoriented son who wants to take care of her and doesn’t know how to begin. One of these stories centers upon a broken Tilt-A-Whirl ride. The story itself is divided into twelve pieces. By that I mean individual moments in time are separated by white space, and by stumbling on that form, I have found a way to sound a little like me.
But one day, I’ve had enough. Enough of waiting in stalled traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. Enough of behaving myself during a regime change at work, where the new CEO tells us that flextime will soon be a way of the past. No more funny postcards on our cubicle walls, no more torn T-shirts worn on the job. Dress code, work on weekends, abrupt layoffs to keep everyone on their feet. The stock market crash has knocked the company off its feet, and we’ve been made to think we’ve contributed to the mess. At least I have another place to go. At least I’ve already been accepted to two residencies, one in the Berkshires, the other over the border in Upstate New York. When I go in to tell Jean, my cool, sweet boss, she completely understands why I have to leave. She doesn’t make me feel as if I’m letting her or anyone else down. She looks at me as if she’d even like to go along with me. No one wants the ship when the captain is already taking it down.
2010 | At some point in the tsunami coverage, I know that the disaster is not going to transpire. Perhaps it has to do with the intensity of the vocabulary: receding, discoloration. Or the tone of it, which is a shade too portentous. Rick Sanchez, for one, is so pissed off with the affable manner of the scientist he’s interviewing that he yells at him. Sanchez waves his hands, demanding his guest not sound so nonchalant. Sanchez has a story he’s responsible for, and he must think he’ll look like a fool if there’s no story to tell.
I’m simply bothered that I’ve organized the afternoon around the event, which has been given an estimated time of arrival, as if a jetliner is coming in to the Hilo Airport. The speed of the wave has been compared to the speed of a jetliner, and perhaps that’s what I find compelling about the phenomenon. But there is that impulse in us that says, come on, wave. Come on. Slop over car and grass and shrub: come on. The inevitable, this thing that wants to do us in: we can’t watch the spectacle of it with any di
stance or detachment. We can’t see that this wave is not about us.
Artist Colony
1988 | I don’t yet see that living in an unheated chicken coop in the Berkshires might not be the best way to spend a late winter month. Nor do I see that cleaning the bathrooms—including the toilets, with their scum and mysterious splashes—might be fairly low on the rungs of the chore ladder. I’ll take shoving logs into the wood stove in the middle of the night. I’ll take getting down on all fours and scrubbing the bathroom floor; no one could have known it was sky-blue beneath all that gray. But cooking is work for another animal—I’m sorry. I can barely heat up water for Red Zinger tea. And I worry all week until it is my night to help out, and when I do, I prepare the tabouli and the hummus as if I’ve been eating the stuff all my life.
In short, I am happy here. I am happy to wake up to the frost inside the windowpanes every morning. I am happy not to think about the coworkers, parents, or friends I’ve left behind. Happy, happy, happy am I in this place that is really more commune than colony, only ten people here at a time. I am so happy that I wonder if I’ve even called Denise. The single phone booth in the dining hall must be shared by all in the span of an hour. If I do call her, I’ll only talk for five minutes, because someone will inevitably be waiting outside to call her boyfriend or art dealer. It is good for Denise not to have an outlet for her obsessions. Maybe it is good for me, too, though I miss her terribly sometimes, especially on those nights when someone’s said a thoughtless thing. I can just hear her, aghast. What a stupid thing to say. And yet the dirty floors, the chicken coop, the woodsy meals—all that has given me permission to be someone else. I work on a very short story that takes me three full days to write. I work on another story about a curmudgeonly developer, Clem Thornton, builder of Walden Ponds (Thoreau Lane, Emerson Road, Margaret Fuller Court). And—an idea catches in my head like a piece of straw to my wool sweater—Clem’s grandson, Red, is attracted to other men. Red is in charge of the story.