by Renata Adler
The passport, I had noticed, was growing smaller, over the years, and changing fabric. I had learned from the dragon of the passport office that they even planned to diminish it, within a year or two, to the size and texture of a credit card. To avoid fraud, they said, but also, and there seemed to me an unconscious totalitarian longing in this, to serve, as papers required on one’s person in police states have always served, as permanent proof of citizenship, and of identity.
But in London, don’t you see, the phone rang. In London, on Hays Mews in fact, the phone rang. I was asleep. He said, You’ve left. I said, I haven’t. He said, You have.
But will they understand it if I tell it this way?
Yes, they will. They will surely understand it.
But will they care about it?
That I cannot guarantee.
I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence. Diana had also said, The only ones who helped us in those days were the Palestinians. But we had just met, and I didn’t even know who “us” was or what, helped with what, so I let it pass. And then, when only she and John and I were still at the table, she said, I understand everything about Greek drama now. And she told of having asked an old Greek in a little mountain village whether he had ever heard of Diana; she meant the goddess. He had replied: I never met her, but she was very beautiful; my grandfather knew her very well. Then she said, What I understand about Greek tragedy now is this: the Athenians went to three dramas in a single day, and at the end they were so exhausted, that was the catharsis. The exhaustion itself was the catharsis. She and John and their daughter had gone, it seems, to a therapy group, in Lausanne, where they live. And the daughter had gotten up, one of the first to speak, and said many things about her parents. John had gotten up to answer, doing so quietly, in his way and so as not to hurt his daughter, and crying as he spoke, which is not at all his way or the way of that sort of American. Then, it was Diana’s turn. She had looked around, she said, and thought, These worms, I can do this easily, these worms, particularly as I have been through a lot in my life, and now I am going to act, that is perform. But somewhere in the course of her speaking she was moved to tears, and when she had finished, the leader, knowing that this marked an emotional caesura for the whole group, called an intermission. And during the intermission the gathering broke as it were into three large factions, some with John, some with Diana, but a great wave bearing her daughter toward Diana, wanting reconciliation, a scene. Diana thought again, These worms. And, as her daughter was borne directly to her, crying, Diana said, “Not here.” But this is not about that. In the end, this is not about that, though that “Not here” had immense repercussions for me. This is about friendship, and my tantrum, and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time.
These are the categories: arbitrary, necessary, futile. Intimate, public. These are the characters, these are the events. Over here, are the strategies and theories. Cadences. And in London, after all, there were the phone calls. Sometimes I was asleep, sometimes you were.
This is a conservative, even a reactionary town, and yet, every year since anyone can remember, it has been the only town in the state to have a Labor Day parade. Frank and Marilyn, my nearest neighbors, are conservative, even reactionary voters. We became friends in the first week I moved here. Marilyn brought a flowering plant in welcome, stayed for coffee and a cigarette, then called to ask whether I would like to come to dinner the following night at five o’clock. Five o’clock, I thought, farmers’ hours, country people’s hours, although our farming neighbors, when I was growing up, I dimly recalled, had dinner more nearly at six or even six-thirty, and though I knew that Frank and Marilyn are not farming people. She runs a private kindergarten; he is an engineer. When I arrived at their house, there was for some time no question at all of eating. They were already drinking, and I joined them. When we did finally have dinner, hamburgers, I think, with spaghetti sauce and wine, it was long after eleven. And by the time I crossed the road, through the chill air, to my house, we had told each other more than some close friends of many years. Just as well. Our driveways are close enough for us to see who comes and goes, and, from time to time, hear bits of conversation, borne with improbable clarity on the night wind. What we would have known anyway, as neighbors, we know instead as friends. They are kind, educated, tolerant, church-going people, with their own history of trouble, bordering at one time on local scandal; and when I mention what I think of as their conservatism, quite apart from how they vote, I mean, for instance this: at odd hours, motorcycles and heavy trucks have begun of late to thunder at high speeds along our road, using it as a short cut between one highway and another. Apart from the noise, this back road, which is narrow and winding, was not meant for speed, or for the weight and width of trucks. In winter, especially, there are always crashes. When some neighbors suggested a petition, to post signs lowering the speed limit and also reading No Thru Trucks, Frank and Marilyn refused to sign. They so disliked the Sierra Club, Clamshell Alliance overtone, they said. This position carried in our neighborhood. All winter there will again, presumably, be crashes. But Frank says it is clear, at least, that this is not and will never be a Clamshell Alliance sort of town.
As a child, like many children, I sometimes received a diary with a little lock and key. Each time, and it cannot have been more than five times in all, I would begin, full of hope, on the first page, and immediately become dissatisfied. Not, certainly, on literary grounds. I never got that far. But on grounds (and this still seems odd to me) of penmanship. The thing did not look right. There was always some sort of blot or crooked line. I would try to erase, begin again, then give it up. This object, with its blurred start and months of empty pages, would lie around, be submerged under other books and papers, resurface, finally be thrown out. Only twice in my life have I come any nearer to the keeping of a journal. The second time was in my twenties. In an ordinary notebook, with no lock of course and with undated pages, I wrote daily, from one Sunday to Wednesday of the following week. I don’t know which month or year, although I remember that the time was summer. I know the weekdays only because I wrote them, in ballpoint, printed capitals, at the top of every page. What brought the effort to an end on Thursday was that I looked back. I read the entries for the past nine days, and I simply could not understand them. They might have been by a stranger and in code.
The penmanship was fine, still those clear, regular capitals. But the record was of moods. There were no events, few names, no facts, no indication whatever of what happened, apart from this gloom, that cheering up, this gloom again. What few names there were appeared uncharacterized, and not part of any incident or sentence; and the moods were described only to the extent of being up or down, like a chart of the stock market or of an illness. There was less information than one would record, in advance, on any social calendar. The events simply were not there, and, more surprisingly, I could not reconstruct them. Not from the mood clues, not from the fact that they had occurred so recently. I could more accurately recall events that had occurred long years before. And the first, the only other time, I tried to keep a journal had, in fact, occurred long years ago, when I was twelve. That journal covered months, on a daily basis, and in very considerable detail. And the salient point about it was only this: that it was lies. My letters, too, at that time and after, consisted largely of what I wanted other people to believe. I wanted that diary found. I cannot believe I was entirely different in this from others. And so, when I read biographies reconstructed largely from diaries, or from letters to, from, or about obscure or famous men and women, it seems to me that unless mine is an isolated and unusual case (and of course, in a way, what is at issue is precisely the class of isolated and unusual cases) those diaries, letters, interesting though they may be, are probably quite largely false. And, as for journals, these days, “I can show you in my journal; I have it right here in my journal” usually implies a threat, by someone who either keeps no jo
urnal, or who makes the “it” recorded in it up.
Well, I couldn’t go back to sleep, of course, how could I. I said, Of course, I haven’t left. He said, You have.
To begin with, I almost went, instead, to Graham Island. I had been muttering for months that I wanted to go somewhere, somewhere else, beautiful and quiet, on the sea. When I went to Jon and Maria’s house for dinner, Gavin and Jon, or rather Gavin’s wife and Jon had had a quarrel so bitter that Gavin and Jon were going to dissolve their partnership. When I arrived for dinner, Maria was in the kitchen. Gavin and Jon were in the living room. In the tension of their silence, I mentioned wanting to go somewhere, somewhere beautiful and quiet, on the sea. Gavin said he had friends who had a place on an island off Vancouver. Maybe I would like to rent it. I said, How wonderful, and really thought no more about it. The next morning, though, Gavin called and said that the house was in fact available. I could have it, starting next week, for no rent. I said, Oh, I couldn’t do that, I absolutely must pay rent. Gavin said, Well, you’ll have to discuss that with the owners. So, when I called the owners, I began by saying I really must pay rent. And the assumption was thus, before we even began, that I was going to take the house. The house of strangers, friends of a man I hardly knew, who was about to become a former partner of my friend. They were both on the line, when I called, the owners of this house, husband and wife. They were anthropologists, bright, enthusiastic, kind. The house was on both a river and the sea. One could step out of the house and fish. I was welcome to use their poles.
The island had a rain forest. One flew to Vancouver, from there to another island, then took the ferry; two islands later, there one was. No worry about hospitals, there was a military installation there of sorts, the nearest observation post for Siberia. Siberia, I said. Well, yes, the island was six hundred miles, in fact, from Vancouver. There was a car there, I should pick it up from their friend the Danish baron. Not to worry if, on my way back, my luggage was searched intensively by customs. A weed much sought after by hippies grew there in profusion. The phone, the toaster, and a few other objects of value in the house were concealed, inside a hollow beam. I would find them easily. They were hidden only so that no hippie or other passerby, seeing the phone for instance, would be tempted to make long-distance calls. As soon as I had found the phone, and plugged the jack into the outlet, I should call the owners, and tell them how I was. Also, before leaving for Vancouver, I should call the Danish baron and tell him when I would arrive, so that he could arrange for someone to meet me. At the dock, of the third island by ferry, from the other island, six hundred miles, by air, from Vancouver.
Well, I called the Danish baron, and his accent seemed instantly recognizable to me. I thought, What is this German pretending to be a Dane doing on an American island, six hundred miles from Vancouver, which is the nearest outpost to Siberia. I thought, a war criminal. My state of mind. I still resolved to go. It was somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and quiet, on the sea. Two nights before I left, however, I had a thought. I had begun to worry a bit about the isolation. I called the owners of the house. I reached the wife. How far, I asked, how far from their house was the nearest neighboring house. Oh, she said, not far. You can see it from the window. It’s just up the hill actually. A very interesting house. Built and owned by an Indian. A Haida. Of course, he leases it now. The first trace of a hesitation in her voice. To the government of Canada. She distinctly paused. As a retreat. I said, A retreat. She said, Yes. But there are never more than six. I did not ask six what. She said, Alcoholic. Indians. Well, I couldn’t do it. Maybe I should have done it, but I couldn’t. I still had my ticket to Seattle, though, and somehow that became fixed in my mind. So I called Ted, who had lived, years ago, in Tacoma, and who had bought a house there so remote that even the people who built it for the sake of its remoteness found it too remote and sold it, to ask him where to stay outside Seattle. But it was Friday, he was not in his office. I asked his secretary where he stayed when he was in Seattle. She said, You wouldn’t want to stay there, let me find a place where you should stay. I said no, thank you. Within minutes, there was a call from a vice president of Ted’s company in Tacoma. He said, We’re very hospitable out here. Just tell me what sort of thing you want. I said, Somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and quiet, on the sea. Here’s exactly what you do, he said: take the flight to Seattle; at the airport, rent a car, drive to Anacostia, take the ferry. The third stop is Orcas Island. Get off there, drive fifteen miles, to Warriloway, and stay there. So, I did it. And Warriloway turned out to be, among other things, a business conference center, with walls so thin I could hear the man in the next room saying, Sweetie, where did you get these plums, they’re really good. She told him, so I drove the thirteen miles and bought plums. At night, I could hear the rock cassettes, by which they went to sleep; and, in the room on the other side, a television set. I was too tired to turn back. The island was as beautiful as any I had ever seen. Here’s who else was there: Thelma, the theosophist, who sings songs from The Sound of Music, in her operatic voice, so loudly that when she weeds her garden, her voice carries for miles across the bay. Also—her nephew told me this, and I was later able to confirm it—the knobs on the chest of drawers in her bedroom are made of her children’s baby teeth. Her husband is a giant, and Thelma and the two daughters I met are also giantesses. At the party of an architect on a mountain top, Thelma mentioned that the Orcas Island camp was the oldest American camp of theosophy. Though I couldn’t really remember what theosophy was, I replied with some enthusiasm. She said they had lectures there each day. Some instinct made me ask whether she went to all of them. And she said, Whenever I can. So we were friends. The others I met were the architect, a young tycoon who led a religious cult, and who had had a falling out with a prophet, the founder of it. All the architect’s land was nonetheless tax free, being owned by the religious foundation. All the work on his property was free as well, since the young people who worked for him were members of the cult, which obliged them to be in effect his slaves. And his wife, who had been married several times before, once to a college president, was the daughter of one of the major inventors in the early days of NASA. And my other friends, my new friends, there, were a couple, owners of the bookshop, which sold prints. He had been a lawyer, but retired, after his heart attacks, to Orcas Island. His wife, the former lawyer’s wife, told me, at the party of the architect on the mountain top, that their daughter, the bookshop owners’ daughter, was on her honeymoon. Rowing. From Seattle to Anchorage. A distance of several thousand miles. This daughter and her new husband liked to row. When they first met, they had rowed all the way around Vancouver, a few hundred miles. I asked where, on this longer trip, they spent the nights. She said camped ashore. I asked whether she worried, on their behalf, about Alaskan wolves. Not wolves so much, she said, bears. I asked whether they rowed facing each other, those thousands of miles. She said no. Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island. And yet, this is not entirely the Wasteland; there are so many other people here.
And, in London, after all, there were the phone calls. Sometimes he was asleep. Sometimes I was. He said, You’ve left. It was my third trip, that fall and winter, standby, New York/London. I said, I haven’t. He said, You have. For no reason, and without warning, you’ve left me, and I’m devastated.
There exists an order of social problem that appears to be insoluble, but is not. At least not in the terms in which resolution of it is represented as impossible. A problem of that sort has at least some of the following features: it appears immensely complicated, with a resolution of any part of it seeming to bring about the aggravation of another; it has a long history, in the course of which it seems to grow, to accrete difficulties, and to merge and overlap with other problems, so that an attempt to solve the single problem appears hopeless without an assault (for which no sufficient resources can exist) upon them all; perception of the length and nature of that history must be inacc
urate, and the terms in which it has been defined must be so imprecise (or so precise, but inapposite) that any formulation of the problem leads inevitably to argument, and great energy is dissipated in argument of that sort. Ideally, in other words, in its historical dimension, such a problem appears to have existed forever; and in its contemporary manifestation to be inextricable from every other problem in the world. Ideally, too, there should have grown up, over time, a number of industries and professions nominally dedicated to the eradication of the problem but actually committed, consciously or unconsciously, but almost inevitably out of self-interest, to the perpetuation of the problem, and of any misconceptions of it, for all time. Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. In the matter of problems that appear to be, but are not, insoluble, the class is the class of all those who profit from a social blunder. The class does not want to be laid off. Wait. Wait.