If I hadn’t had the pen in my hand and the pocket notebook on the table, I’d’ve been staring at, but not paying attention to, whatever game was on the TV over the bar. It had come to that—I could only concentrate lately when the pen scratched the paper, could only escape the odious here and now by scribbling. And the here and now there and then—sitting in a booth at Moynihan’s, nursing a Schaefer draft, and waiting for Katie—was the last place on earth I wanted to be. (I wanted to be in Paris or Amsterdam or Idaho.) Without the visual evidence of authentic, if not exactly nimble, thought, my mind lost confidence in itself and sought the soothing narcotic of distraction and amusement. Katie was off shoplifting in the lingerie department at Filene’s, and part of me, a large uncharitable part of me, wanted her to get caught. Not because arrest would teach her a lesson—I was not so naïve—but because then she would be out of my hair—out of my hair and taken care of. I was making a list in my pocket notebook. 1. Call Larry—work. 2. Call José—1/2 gram. 3. Frommer’s Europe on $10 a Day. 4. Laundry Thursday. 5. Toothpaste and floss.
A gaunt and somewhat round-shouldered guy walked in and took a seat at the end of the bar. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Maybe a dozen other guys had walked into the bar since I’d been sitting there, and not one had attracted more than my momentary attention. There were fifteen guys at the bar, but the new guy was the only intriguing one. He nodded to Eddie and held up two fingers. It wasn’t his thinning hair or the mossy teeth. It’s odd how that happens, and it happens all the time. Something about a person suddenly reaches out to you and draws you in, and when it does, you find yourself imagining that person’s story. I was already thinking that he had a trunkload of secrets he could barely keep closed. If the shame in there were ever to leak out, he’d be devastated. And then I realized what had drawn me to him were his eyelids. They drooped just a tad, not like he was tired exactly, but like he was wary maybe and just a little bit overwhelmed by what he saw. When he turned to watch the game, I went back to my list a new man. I guess I decided to imagine my own life. I wrote, What are you doing, Johnny? What do you want?
I wanted not to live outside. I wanted to be unscented and clean-shaven. I wanted a home with a sink, a shower, and a toilet, a tranquil little flat with cushioned furniture and table lamps. I wanted a console radio with a dial that glowed in the dark, an enamel-topped kitchen table, a toaster, a bread box, and a cast-iron skillet. I wanted clean sheets and photographs on the walls. Venetian blinds, hardwood floors, and a mudroom. I wanted a cheery sanctuary, not unlike, I realized, the Morrisseys’. Evidently I was clinging to the past, moving on but not growing up. I wanted to read books and not paint houses. But who would pay me for that? How badly did I want it? Not badly enough to actually do anything about it.
I was becoming isolated from the few friends I had. I couldn’t drop in on them with Katie in tow. I’d tried that already. She’d stolen a mounted digger wasp from Humphrey Dunt’s insect collection. I brought it back, but Hump said, No more. She insulted Bailey Harold’s wife Tiffany by telling her she was extremely graceful for a cow. Katie could be perfectly sane for twenty minutes—all you really have to do, after all, is keep yourself still and see that one sentence connects with the next. Sanity is just another word for appropriate. But then she’d uncork herself and say something like, “Satan has left the sign of the beast on your forehead.” Later on, while we were bedding down behind the Stoddard mausoleum at Hope Cemetery, she’d tell me it was a joke. They would have let us sleep on the couch, I said. I knew that I was fast approaching the Sargie Galvin line and knew that once I had, there would be no do-over, no redemption.
I was writing all of this down, feeling like I was taking the first step on the road to finding myself, when Katie walked in wearing a floppy blue corduroy hat. Evidently she’d passed through the Filene’s millinery department. She walked to the bar, put her arm around the new guy, and kissed his cheek. Interesting. He handed her a highball glass, and the two of them joined me in the booth. They sat across from me, flank to flank. Katie introduced me to Tombo Pflug. Pleased to meet you. Tombo took a small bottle out of his shirt pocket and tapped several clear drops into each eye. He blinked and shut his eyes. He told me he’d been born without tear ducts.
“Isn’t that cool?” Katie said.
“So you can’t cry?” I said.
“Never have.”
“What do you do when you feel like crying?”
“I never do.”
“You’re a lucky man.”
“When I was a kid, I would scream and whimper, but you can’t keep doing that.”
Katie pulled her purloined chemise and panties out of her purse, finished the last of her brandy, excused herself, and went to the ladies’ room to change and freshen.
Tombo said, “She’s an actress, you know.”
I nodded. “So what do you do, Tombo?”
“I try to be in the moment.”
“Does that pay well?”
“She’s got quite a voice. And I’ve got a band looking for a lead singer.”
“So why aren’t you auditioning her right now?”
“Pawned my Fender. Get it back with the next disability check.”
“What’s the name of your band?”
“You know Katie, then?”
“We go way back.”
“You’ve dated?”
“We have.”
“Good in the sack?”
“I am.”
“SewerSide.”
“What?”
“The band.” And he spelled it for me. “We used to play a lot at the Blue Plate. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”
I hadn’t.
“Before that we were Deathwish Dumpster.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Offhand Butterfly.”
“Nope.”
“Music’s a hard way to earn an easy living,” he said. “So I’ve got a day job.” Tombo leaned to his left and slid his wallet out of his back pocket. He took out a laminated piece of paper and handed it to me. A personal ad he’d taken out in a magazine called Swing Shift, offering his stud service to guys who wanted to watch Tombo boink their wives or girlfriends. Tombo promised discretion and enthusiasm.
“How’s business?”
“Picks up in the winter.”
Someone dropped coins into the jukebox and put on J. Geils, a local band that had made good: “Freeze-Frame.”
“It’s like anything else,” Tombo said. “You’re always dealing with cum-twangs who want a discount, who want to pay you with checks or credit cards. They bust your balls.”
I said, “You know what? I don’t belong here.”
Tombo said, “Hey, I didn’t mean you had to pay to watch. Jesus, what kind of guy—”
“Tell Katie I had to run.” I slid out of the booth. I hurried down Main Street to Central like someone might be after me. I checked in to the Holiday Inn by the expressway. I tossed my change of clothes and backpack into the coin washer, went back to the room, and took a long, luxurious, and steamy shower. Then I called Larry. He said he could put me to work for at least six months. We’d be painting the American Antiquarian Society. I’ll be there at eight, I said. I set the alarm for seven. I asked for a wake-up call. I ran out and bought myself a fifth of Hennessy and a Sky Bar. I retrieved my dried laundry. I found an episode of Newhart on the TV. I loved that show. Alice and I used to watch it. Larry, Darryl, and Darryl were running the Minuteman Café while Kirk was in the hospital. I felt happy, alone in that room in the dark. I loved how the people on the show cared about each other. I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the traffic. I walked to the window and looked down on the glowing sign for the Hawaiian Buffet next door.
I sat at the little desk and wrote in my notebook about how I knew I’d escaped, but I didn’t know how. Something significant had happened in the bar—a dope slap from Tombo. I felt a part of the world again. I remembered Audrey saying, “Abandon your history, Johnny Boy.” O
ne of Valentine Bondurant’s keys to success. That’s how you move on—by letting go. Well, I was never going to graduate from Dr. Bondurant’s School for Champions. Maybe I wouldn’t even move on. But I knew I couldn’t give up what had just helped to save me. I saw myself on the stoop with Blackie, and I wanted to be that boy again, the kid who would do whatever he could to save his sister Audrey. The last time I saw Sargie, he was wearing a black silk baseball jacket and was stumbling up Plantation Street toward home. I told him I was sorry about his mom. She’d died a week earlier. He sucked in his breath, took the measure of me. He wanted to say something. He raised his left arm and his eyebrows, bit his lower lip, shrugged, belched out his breath.
I saw Katie another half dozen or so times, always from a discreet distance. I watched her age twenty years in a couple. Her lipstick and mascara became more emphatic. Her hair thinned. She had this habit of turning her head sharply like she had just heard someone calling her name. After I had left Requiem, I heard from Dooley Raymond that Katie had somehow gotten behind the wheel of a station wagon and killed a pedestrian, a ninety-something-year-old decorated war veteran and his beagle. Hit-and-run, Dooley said. I suppose she went to jail. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive.
Dooley, who used to keep tabs on old friends for me, told his wife after thirteen years of marriage that he thought he would be happier as a lady. His wife Peg called me and asked me to talk some sense to him. I’m not sure if Dooley and Peg ever divorced, but he went ahead and had the operations, moved out to Rutland or Barre or somewhere like that, changed his name to I-forget-what, and took a job as a librarian. I hope she’s happy. I hope she reads this and drops me a letter.
WHEN DAD pulled up out front I noticed he’d had an inscription stenciled in blue Gothic letters over the back window of his white cab. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOUR BEAUTY. As soon as he jumped down from his seat, Audrey was all over him. She climbed up his back, wrapped her legs around his chest and her arms around his neck. Dad galloped up the walk, did a couple of hops on the hopscotch court, and said, “Johnny, how’s your mother?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He hurried past me and through the front door. He didn’t even scratch my head. Blackie did. And he clapped my shoulder. He said, “Fathers—you can’t live with ’em; you can’t live without ’em.” He lit a cigar. I’M IN LOVE WITH YOUR BEAUTY. What was that about? Welcome home, Dad.
You think about your life at all and you begin to see patterns. I find myself expecting to be ignored. I’m always surprised when anyone pays attention to me, even if the attention turns out to be pretense or simple good manners. I teach college to support this writing habit. I got a call a while ago from a colleague at a university who asked me to apply for a job. I was so flattered that I did. I went to the interview. This was just a few years ago. Annick didn’t want me to apply. Why would she want to leave Florida? she said. Wait, I don’t want to start there. Let me move forward a bit and then back up.
Knife in the Head
Quantum entities that have interacted with each other remain mutually entangled, however far they may eventually separate spatially. It seems that nature fights back against a relentless reductionism.
—JOHN POLKINGHORNE
I’M IN AND out of sleep at the Quality Inn when I dream that I’m offered a teaching position at Whitman College, not the Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., where Diane DiPietro teaches, but the Whitman College that is simultaneously in South Florida where I live and in Requiem, Mass., where both Diane and I grew up. This apparent synchronicity is an illustration of what’s going on at Planck length: 10-43 seconds—the shortest anything can get, the boundary where the roil of scrambled, granular space, the quantum foam, is so furious that there is no left or right, no before or after, no here or there, no there there. The dream Whitman New England campus is a single wood-frame building across from L’Hospice de St. Francois, the nursing home for French-Canadians, where I worked as a dutiful, if sullen fourteen-year-old, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and frying French toast.
I accept the Whitman job offer, and I immediately regret my decision. Teach what and to whom? I can’t find the dean or anyone else who can help me. The professors, all of them men with pasty complexions and stooped shoulders, wear plaid flannel shirts and salt-stained hiking boots. Each holds student essays in his hands. I’m depressed already about my pension. I want to tell someone that I’m pretty sure this campus is my uncle Honore’s old triple-decker. If I look off the back porch, I should be able to see his fifteen-foot Elgin V-bottom and his boat trailer in the driveway. I wake up when the door to the next room slams—salesman, I figure, headed off to the airport, has to be in Cleveland for a nine A.M. PowerPoint presentation—“Mistaking Articulation for Accomplishment”—and I realize it’s Ash Wednesday, and I’m visiting a Methodist university in the heart of the heart of the country. Requiem, Mass., is the Heart of the Commonwealth. Walla Walla, Wash., is The Land of Many Waters.
Walla Walla’s founding Whitman was the missionary, Dr. Marcus Whitman, who, along with his wife Narcissa and staff, was massacred by the Cayuse when the Indians found his medical care wanting during a measles epidemic. The dream university’s eponymous Whitman sang of himself, or he made candy, or he yodeled—I don’t have the handbook yet. Walla Walla is fifty-seven hundred miles northeast of Pago Pago (pronounced Pango-Pango) and fourteen hundred miles southwest of Flin Flon, a city straddling the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border and named for Professor Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, a character in J. E. Preston Muddock’s science fiction novel, The Sunless City (which Flin Flonians insist their city is not—it is built on, not beneath, a rock).
MY FRIEND and host Hillary and I have breakfast at the Bob Evans (home of the sausage pinwheel) across the highway from the Quality Inn before I speak to her class. We’ve known each other since our academic exile in Binghamton, New York, City of the Square Deal and the poisoned river, where pink beach balls dance in the foam of the spillway. I tell Hillary how I’d gone back to Bingo recently to see old friends and went to a party for a visiting writer at a student’s flat on the south side. The poets had arrived first and sat in a circle of chairs in the small parlor; all the poets were balding and blond, and each held a slim book in his gracile fingers. The poets had brought along their groupies. They began to sing Tom Paxton songs. I went to the kitchen for spiedies and rum.
The sky is sheet-metal gray here in the heartland. The air is damp and raw, feels like snow. Hillary shares a nickname with an old girlfriend of mine and a medical condition with me. The name is Button, the condition, tinnitus. My left ear rings and clicks constantly, chimes on occasion. Both of Hillary’s ears ring with several distinct notes, like an irritating song, a brain worm you can’t get out of your head. Silence increases the volume, which may be why we keep on talking. We’ll never know quiet again, nor the source of the phantom noise. I show Hillary photos of Spot and Annick. Hillary wants to know where I got the phrase “knife in the head” that I used in a story that she assigned her students to read. I tell her from a Bruno Ganz movie of that name, and she says that she used the same phrase in a poem, and got it from the movie Montenegro, which I loved. Yes, the man with the quite literal knife his head, unlike Bruno’s metaphorical Messer im Kopf. And then I remember that before I fell asleep in the room last night, I had watched a newsmagazine report of a man with a seven-inch serrated kitchen knife buried to the hilt in his brain. We saw the X-ray of the blade angled through the spongy gray matter, rather like a pie server through pudding. The man survived with only a little nerve damage to his left hand and a slight stutter.
I tell Hillary I visited her alma mater a few months back for a job interview. I tell her I didn’t get the job that I was asked to apply for. We order Egg Beaters and Sausage Lite. She leans toward me. I tell her the whole story.
THE TRIGGERING town where I had my actual interview, where Hillary went to school, is 214 miles east-northeast of Walla Walla, 2,340 miles northwest of my home, 5,477 miles northeast
of Pago Pago, 824 miles south-southwest of Flin Flon, and 1,478 miles west-northwest of the Bob Evans Restaurant. My plane was delayed four hours in Minneapolis. I called my friend James in Dinkytown to come sit with me at the airport, but James was not at home. The last time we’d sat and talked about books was at George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We drank PBRs and sat by the fireplace. It was Eudora Welty’s eighty-somethingth birthday. James remembers the birthday of everyone he has ever met.
Hillary reminds me that she once lived in Minneapolis and knew my friend James when they both served on the board of a literary center. She found him intense and quite brilliant, but acerbic. I found a bar modeled after a bar in a TV show, modeled after a bar on Beacon Street in Boston, only here at the terminal Cheers one of the walls was missing, and nobody knew your name. I drank beer and imagined this town I was going to: raised wooden sidewalks on the main street; snug taverns serving redeye, mulled cider, and sarsaparilla; looming mountains shawled in snow; rusted Ford pickups idling in front of the pharmacy; log cabins, their cracks chinked up with moss; children skating on a pond, bundled against the wind. Yes, I could live there.
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