by Leigh Newman
And still, I didn’t give up. But standing up to my waist in fifty-degree water, casting and casting and casting, I suspected why I wasn’t succeeding, despite my slavish obedience to Dad’s philosophy that fishing has to be an obsession for it to work. My hook was in the water. I was now obsessed.
But obsessed with what? I didn’t know—or couldn’t say. But I knew it wasn’t kings. And deep in the water, rushing by my lures and flies and wader boots, the great and mighty kings must have known that it wasn’t them, either. They were punishing me, in fact, for going through the motions, for being an imposter, for doing everything that my dad said to do to catch them, just so that nobody could say I hadn’t done my best.
“You’ll get one,” Dad kept saying, bringing me hot chocolate on the bank or a new glob of fish eggs. “It just depends on when.”
Or: “I never liked kings all that much. They’re overrated as a species.”
Or: “You know, sometimes I don’t catch fish, either. Then I just knock off and relax and come back in a few days.”
Did he suspect the truth? I worked the river harder. I stayed on the bank longer. And finally, one fateful day in deep July, on the banks of Theodore Creek, I hooked a king—and leaped off my spot on the sunken driftwood log, reeling and crashing downstream, fighting that heavy, headstrong liquid cannonball of a fish and trying not to lose him, praying my God please don’t let me lose him, pulling him in at long last, holding him up, showing the world my thirty pounds of gasping, silver victory. But I wasn’t ecstatic. I wasn’t joyous. I was relieved. My father snapped a picture, then framed it and placed it right where I’d always dreamed of having it placed: the Wall of Outdoor Honor.
The Wall of Outdoor Honor was a small blank patch of Sheetrock directly above Dad’s fly-tying desk. On it hung the stuffed thirty-two-inch rainbow trout that he caught on a dry fly, a trout the size of a salmon (the average size of rainbow being eight pounds), as well as the framed, ripped tails of Abbie’s blue oxford shirt, cut off by her flight instructor after her first solo flight.
And then there was the photograph of me. I was squatting on the gravel, holding on to my just-caught, thirty-pound Theodore Creek king like a real Alaskan. Save for the fact that even a smallish trophy of the species weighs in at sixty or seventy pounds. Save for the fact that I had caught mine on an amateur lure with a treble hook instead of an expert, hard-to-set fly.
Any real Alaskan who saw that picture up on the wall would know exactly what it was—and so would any real Newman, like my brother and like any other babies that were going to come after him. Because they were going to grow up and learn to hike and learn to hunt and learn to catch the kind of fish that actually belonged here—difficult-to-catch, record-sized, legitimate fish. They were going to spend a lifetime with my dad in the bush, not just the summers. They were going to see all the desperate chasing-after in what I had done, which is all I could see looking at the photograph—in my smile, in my averted eyes, in my fresh, incandescent, hard-won king. I would have taken it off the wall, but Abbie or Dad might have noticed. And I couldn’t think of a lie believable enough to serve as an excuse.
Moving from place to place, you develop routines to ease any confusion. Like never opening your suitcase your first day home. An open suitcase only leads to long hours doing load after load of tedious laundry, which, in turn, only leads to your leaving for somewhere, anywhere else because you feel too overwhelmed about everything that needs to be done to get your life in that particular location started up again.
I’ve been back from the Galapagos for three days and my still-packed duffel is lumped in the corner of my apartment, saggy and abandoned, looking at me as if to say, You know there are swimsuits in here, right? The ones you didn’t bother to dry? Not to mention that seashell you insisted on taking, with those potent bits of recently deceased sea creature spackled onto the mother-of-pearl?
I ignore it, in favor of a long acclimating walk in the dark. I do this almost everywhere I go, but in New York I have a specific route, which takes me in a long, slanted rectangle around the island of Manhattan. Light spills out of the matzo factory across the street. A pit bull barks, left loose on the fire escape to guard his owner’s window.
I walk and walk, up from the Lower East Side to Midtown then to the Upper East Side then back down Fifth Avenue to the West Village. The city at night is never as loud as it seems in movies, or as urban. Under the lights and smoke and bar talk dribbling through the open doors, the smell of ocean floats through the alleys of downtown; the smell of trees lingers up by the park. I lean into the wind, my hands clenched into a fist with my house key poking out between my fingers so that if somebody jumps me, I’ll be ready to jab him in the eye. It’s a trick a chatty homeless lady on my block taught me, though I don’t see her tonight as I wind through the East Village, past the empty park and after-hours gambling club.
At moments like these, strangely enough, this loud, overrun island reminds me of Alaska. It’s cold here in New York. It’s hard to survive: to secure food and a warm place to sleep, to not get killed by a random bullet or a thoughtless mistake on your part, such as wandering into the path of a bus or subway, which is not unlike wandering into a grizzly or moose, in that these are all encounters with things that don’t have a lot of empathy about your life or death, things much larger and faster than yourself.
And then there are the people. Somebody somewhere with a PhD and an interest in human paradoxes has got to be charting the official relationship between danger and dreamers. Alaska is full of dreamers, and so is New York. Here, they’re going to be Broadway stars or Wall Street titans. They’re finally going to be rich and famous and happy. There, they’re going to discover gold in a collapsed Arctic mine, or buy a boat and haul in million-dollar catches of Alaskan king crab. They’re finally going to be rich and famous and happy.
For the past five years—my on-and-off tenure in New York—I’ve noticed these similarities. I’d like to think that I choose to stay here because of them. But when it comes right down to it, I’m not really living in this city. I’m not really living anywhere.
Instead I’ve moved around the world in decadent, short-term stretches: two weeks in Oslo, three weeks in New York, three weeks in Bora-Bora, two weeks in New York. I’ve flown down the Loire in a farmer’s crop duster, studying the formal gardens of French châteaux. I’ve studied art restoration in Florence and flower arranging in Japan. I’ve danced with a band of transvestite Indian boys in the desert near Pakistan and gone just over the heavily armed border to buy smuggled cigarettes from a guy with a camel. Often it feels as if these trips are daydreams—thick, rich fantasies with sound and smell and color, snow and roses, saffron and castles.
New York, however, feels even less real. It’s true that Travel Time pays me next to nothing (a lot of people want to be travel writers; there’s no real incentive to pay me a reasonable wage). But my so-called home base used to be an experimental theater. It still sort of looks like one—a vast, filthy linoleum space, with a couch and a mattress left by the previous tenant. For a table, I nailed together some scrap wood and a Formica counter that I found on the street. I haven’t bought curtains or a toothbrush caddy. Everything I own fits in the two duffel bags that I keep in the closet, including my one appliance: my answering machine.
Snow is falling in St. Petersburg—feathering the cobblestones, the dusty, unpaved sidewalks. The sky is wide and white, the breeze warm and smelling of the sea. People nod as they pass, as if the snow is a secret that everyone shares but will not ruin by acknowledging out loud. Even the Mafia men guarding the entrance of my hotel have to struggle not to smile behind their machine guns.
The city spreads out—twisting boulevards, sunset-colored palaces, long gray canals crossed by bridges like fluttery, stone parades. I hurry on to the Mariinsky Theatre, a French fountain of a building, beruffled with nineteenth-century plaster moldings. The entrance, however, is nothing more than a few bare benches lit by jaundice-co
lored 1960s fluorescents. The guard is still smoking, as he has been for the past week. The turnstile remains locked.
“Maybe today?” I ask.
He grunts and turns a page of his newspaper.
I sit down on a bench. It’s been five years since the Communists cleared out of Russia. But the mentality remains rigidly in place. I faxed the ballet director every day for weeks before coming. He never responded—a detail that I failed to tell my editor, having been too overcome by my lifelong desire to get here, too busy hustling the article idea: How was the world’s most prestigious ballet troupe faring in the new Russia, a land of capitalism, democracy, and zero state funding?
Eight hours sludge by. Dancers exit and enter—not in tutus or sweaty ripped leg warmers. They wear miniskirts and thick nude-colored hose and blue eye shadow, slathers of it, as if they’re actresses or very thin, graceful hookers with foot deformities that cause them to waddle. The guard never so much as glances up from his ashtray at their passage. He has a phone in his booth, in addition to that ashtray. Rotary.
I have to do something, or I’ll go back to New York without a story. Without a story, there will be no job. Without a job, there will be no more traveling. And I can’t function in everyday professional adult society. My one and only full-time job was with a New York book publisher, for eight long, anxious, ego-crippling months, after which my boss, an editor, sat me down and said, “You’re the worst assistant I’ve ever had. You can’t xerox. You can’t take phone messages. You need to do something that doesn’t require team playing.”
Like what? I thought. Violin?
Now I wish I had asked him that question—sincerely. Because he was right. I’m not a team player. I would like to change this, but how? Growing up in the wilderness, packing in your own drinking water, trained not to trust your own father when he says your safety is on does not make for great team playing. And in Baltimore, where the girls knew all about teams—how to sling a lacrosse ball from pouch to pouch, how to knock a polo ball from galloping pony to galloping pony, how to drunkenly but accurately whack your best friend’s croquet ball into the poison ivy—I never made the team, which by the way came with a white blazer, a deb party, and a wedding to a boy from the boys’ school across the street.
Instead, at age fourteen, I went to Japan, for the most part, on my own. Roland Park Country offered all kinds of overseas exchange programs to Russia, Paris, Istanbul. I happened to score the only free one—a trip to Japan, where my job was to represent the United States as a “youth ambassador.” What I did was appear on television (talking about how much Americans loved Japan), tour steel factories (admiring molten metals and bowing to plant managers), and visit schools (attempting calligraphy with preapproved student hosts). At night, I ate five-course French dinners in luxury hotels, the table stocked with local dignitaries wearing Italian suits.
There were five or six other kids my age on this trip, living with host families. But I had been separated from the group in order to perform many of these official functions, mostly, I suspect, because when it came to fermented bean curd, I was open to the idea. I liked eating all that salty, raw, unidentifiable food, some of which may or may not have been still alive. I liked approximating the seventeen intricate steps of a four-hundred-year-old tea ceremony and disassembling a robotic toilet in an attempt to get it to flush. I liked driving around in minivans with drunk grown-ups, doing backseat karaoke, and hiking through sweltering Japanese jungles, fighting off greedy monkeys and sampling pickled radishes from a bent, wrinkled master briner in his rickety hut. Most of all, I loved my hotel. I could have lived there forever in my room on the sixty-fifth floor, accessed by a talking, translucent elevator that whooshed you up so fast it was as if you were being vacuumed straight to heaven on a chip of glass.
Back in America, I had to fly five thousand miles to see either of my parents, and yet it had never occurred to me that I could go anywhere else. The world was a tiny, fixed planet consisting of a handful of familiar, comforting airports (Sea-Tac and O’Hare) and two distant hometowns, neither of which, at this point, felt much like home.
Japan rebuilt the map, down to the key and directions. I had a new place to go—not south, not north—just out. At age eighteen, I moved to California, then to France, then back to California, then to Boston, then to New York, then to France (Paris, plus three other cities), then back to New York. During this period, I attended four colleges—the longest stretch spent, to my high school counselor’s completely unchecked surprise, at Stanford. I couldn’t really settle on any one subject, so I double-majored (English? economics?) and almost completed a third (drama?). After graduation, I couldn’t really settle on a job or geography or lease. I worked as a temp. I rented rooms. Finally, I landed a two-month-long gig fact-checking at a retirement magazine. My office was the company supply closet. I sat at a desk surrounded by shelves filled with boxes of ballpoint pens.
There, in the inky-smelling quiet, I knew in a dim way—the idea would flash on and off—that other people who had gone to Stanford had moved on to things like the Olympics and Harvard Law School and the House of Representatives. My own trajectory to the supply closet didn’t bother me very much. But what I was envious of was the internal clarity these former schoolmates seemed to have—and, in most cases, had always had, which had resulted in their current lives. These were people who had refused to let anyone take their picture with a keg cup during frat parties, for fear of where it might pop up later in their political life, people who had written poems and sent them to one of the seventeen Nobel Prize winners on the faculty, along with a note saying “I’m going to be a poet. Could you help me get an internship at the Paris Review this summer?”
Not only did I not know what the internationally famous, award-winning Paris Review was, but saying you wanted to be a poet for even a part-time Great Alaskan twenty-one-year-old was like saying you wanted to be a mermaid. I could predict the outcome of that scenario.
Me: I want to be a mermaid, Dad.
Dad: Okay. Be the one who drinks the potion and grows legs and gets a job.
The supply closet did, however, come with the perk of a paycheck—though no health care or retirement plan. One day, on the way to the bathroom, I ran into an editor who worked at a new magazine next door. We started talking about our rogue communal copier, which morphed into a discussion about Faulkner and the art of writing short stories. Out of nowhere, she offered me a job at her new shop, Travel Time.
“I’m not the right fit, probably,” I said. “I’m on my way to Indonesia. Then Vietnam. And maybe Laos?”
She gave me a look, the kind that makes you look at yourself and see that you’re a total idiot. “Well,” she said. “You can work in a closet and travel on your dime. Or you can work for me at my travel magazine. With a travel budget.”
Which is why I’m here, staring holes into the head of a post-Soviet guard. A man who is not going to cause me to lose the only job I may ever be capable of doing, a job that is the greatest job on the planet, thank you very much. I get up off the bench and stomp out the front door to the street. There are no real stores in St. Petersburg, unfortunately, except for oddball, Mafia-run basement places selling cherry juice, zippers, and ninety-dollar jars of knockoff caviar. A girl hustles by me on the sidewalk—eye shadow, miniskirt, bare legs, cheesy gold-painted heels.
“I’ll give you forty dollars for your clothes,” I say.
She looks at me. Maybe I guessed wrong; she doesn’t speak English.
“Okay, fifty, plus the shoes and pantyhose.”
She goes on looking, looking, looking. Maybe she thinks I’m some kind of female American pervert. There are a lot of loose, confusing perverts in the new and improved Russia.
“Fine. A hundred. And I’ll give you my clothes. Okay?”
Her face lights up. The average non-Mafia salary is about seventy dollars a month. She starts stripping down behind a corner.
At the theater, I pause before entering i
n my borrowed clothes. I’m a dancer, I remind myself, I belongIbelongIbelongIbelong. This is a pod of human beings this time, not dolphins—people who speak a language I don’t speak and walk funny and wear too much gloppy, off-color foundation. On the desk, the rotary phone rings. A man with a suit and briefcase whisks by through the turnstile. I straighten up, apply a busy, tired, artistic look, and waddle past the guard, who does not look up, not even to register my attempt at cleavage.
Which was a lucky break, I realize later that night, in my palatial pink grande-dame hotel, after a full day of successful interviews with dancers and teachers. Cleavage would have been a serious error. My boobs are fat American boobs. Only my borrowed clothes and imitation waddle saved me. And, just possibly, my busy artistic face—a face that somehow came naturally to me, assumed without any thought or planning; I simply looked at the girls and slid their features and attitude onto my own, down to the raised eyebrow.
Looking in the bathroom mirror, I try the face again. Hello. Then drop it. Good-bye.
It’s not unfathomable why I can pull off this unsettling but evidently useful trick. There was a long, embarrassing period in Baltimore, of course, when I did try to fit in. I was a teenager. I worshipped the ease of the girls in my class, their passing laughter, their station wagons slathered with beach permits and stickers of schools named like English dukes (Sir Bates, Lord Groton).
Thus began my campaign. Luckily for me, anything new in Baltimore was considered showy. That included clothes. I filched ratty ragg-wool sweaters and exquisitely ripped T-shirts extolling bars in Martha’s Vineyard from the school’s lost and found. I stole money from my mother’s wallet. I dumped the one or two old friends I had and insinuated myself into any group that would tolerate a girl who didn’t really talk but was always somehow awkwardly present, even if she had been elegantly and, at times, even kindly dismissed. Most of all, I trained my face to hold very still, or curve into a careless smile, when that entire group would spot me approaching, then jump in a car and drive away, leaving me standing in the parking lot, holding on to my backpack as if its pocket and zippers held the secrets to the universe.