72.
The Only Worlds We Have
TIME BEARS AWAY ALL THINGS. THAT’S WHAT DALE’S THINKING THIS MORNING. Carries away pain and loss and dreams and youth. Concentrates the heart, but muddles the mind. It’s 6:15; he’s into the third day of this cycle of insomnia, and he feels like a trembling machine. He’s exhausted, but he knows this too will pass. These mornings, Dale keeps a thermos of coffee on the nightstand so that he can drink a cup before he steps out of his bed, walks to the kitchen, and perks another pot of coffee. Dale sits at the kitchen table, sipping, scratching notes. Keynes sleeps on the braided rug in front of the sink. Dale has his caffeine, his solitude, and an hour to prepare a lecture on stock markets, as if a single cowboy or bowhead in his class gave two sweet shits about emerging markets and global investing. And why should they? It’s boring. Face it. Boring and irrelevant. Twenty years ago he had to select a major at UNM. He loved geography, thought about political science, figured it would be impractical, he can’t remember why, and wrote down Economics for some reason. Dale sees Keynes lift his head, and then he hears Peter walking down the hall toward the bathroom.
On the day that I cleaned out Judi’s office on Irving Street, brought home the few items that Stoni or Trixie might want (a photograph of Judi, Stoni, and a friend, all about ten or eleven, all in pajamas, and all sitting on the hood of a car at the drive-in; an ashtray that said Nick’s Colonial Grille; a stack of business cards; a crystal bud vase; an address book; and a silk paisley scarf), cut up her Memorial Hospital ID card, and burned her sickness clothes (the woolen robe, the flannel pajamas, the slippers, the sweat suits), on that day I was sure Theresa was going to die. Ovarian cancer, automobile wreck. Or maybe not die, but find out that living with Dale was harder than she had imagined it. Or maybe Peter’s father came back, and Theresa remembered why she had loved him. Or she would have a nervous breakdown. But none of that happened.
When Dale asked Theresa to marry him, or decided to ask, my story was over, I suppose, but I couldn’t stop writing about these two. I’d been with them every day for more than a year. I wanted to find out what happened in their lives, not just in the courtship. The story may have been over, but their lives were not. Of course, I knew that if I continued to write about them, then one day I would have to write something like, One morning Dale awoke with a numbness in his right arm and right leg. Perhaps it will pass, he thought. He crawled to the kitchen. And so on. What I knew was that in fiction, the only false ending is And they all lived happily ever after. So where and when do I stop?
Judi told me that what she tried to do in therapy was simple—get the client moving. Inertia was always trouble. Her goal was this: to help the person realize how he was keeping himself the same, and then to help him understand how he could change that situation. She said, Habit stifles perception. To act habitually is to act without thinking. If you stop the habit, you get to start your life again, and one good way to do that is to fall in love. Love is change. It is not a condition, but a behavior. Routine is death to love. A marriage might stall and remain a marriage, but love stilled becomes something else. Two things, she said: Love is always a surprise, and you never get it right.
Me, I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful or so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate. Judi and I had much love, I think, but little pleasure. And that’s okay. Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It’s love that’s essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate. But death is the price you pay for this privilege.
Because I still love Judi, I want to be with her, and I am. I sit here at the table and close my eyes and see her clearly—her cobalt-blue silk T-shirt, her black tights, her hair in spikes—and I wonder what she’s thinking, what she’ll do. She closes her book—she’s reading Stendhal, I see. Curious. She comes to me. She touches my hands so I’ll stop this typing. She kisses my right eye, my left eye, my ears, my chin, my lips, the tip of my nose. She holds her cheek against mine. I feel her hand at my neck, the flush of my skin, the purring in my brain. I wonder what I’ll do now.
Dale pours Peter’s Froot Loops into a bowl, splashes in the milk. He pours Peter a glass of orange juice. When Peter sits at the kitchen table, Dale pats the boy’s head, ties his shoes. Dale brings a small radio to the table and tunes in an oldies station that Peter likes. Magic, Peter says. Magic 102. Dale walks down the hall, knocks on Caitlin’s opened door, says, Time to get up, sugar. School. Keynes limps along behind Dale. His arthritis is so bad that the vet suggested putting Keynes down. The animal is in quite a lot of pain, Mr. Evans. But he’s alive, Dale thought. He can’t bring himself to do it. In their bedroom, Dale looks at Theresa sleeping. Dead sleep, he knows, dreamless sleep. He wonders why she has seemed so unhappy for so long, a couple of years now. She loves him, he knows. But she has regrets that he knows nothing about. He can sense this in the way she sleeps so profoundly, at such length, sits so quietly at night, in the way her easy smile masks emotion. He touches her shoulder. Honey. Sweetheart. Wake up. Come on now. Theresa. It’s morning.
I called Francis X. We met for drinks at Moynihan’s. Francis X. told me the oldest daughter, Fiona, had moved to New York, New York, with a college boy He told me that the offer of the job was still open, but I would have to let him know by the end of the month. August would be too late. I told him I’d think about it, I really would. He said, And what about the rest of your life? Meaning Martha? I said. He nodded. I shook my head. He said, Well, maybe it’s all for the best. John Joe set us up with two more shots of Jameson’s. We drank, watched the Sox get slaughtered by Baltimore, fall from first, and start their inevitable slide to oblivion. You have to love them.
Nicky said, You can live to work or you can work to live. We sat in his room eating Vietnamese out of boxes and watching Andy of Mayberry and You’ll Never Get Rich simultaneously. He said, Writing stories isn’t frying fish. Give yourself another twenty years, he said. Write every day. Then, if no one wants your stories, give yourself another twenty years.
Dale sits on the couch at midnight, TV on to the late news, but mute. He tries to read the newscaster’s lips. He pages through his collection of presidential buttons, wondering when he lost his enthusiasm for the hobby. All the Way with JFK. He has students who haven’t heard of Kennedy, who think that anything that happened before their births is irrelevant. Maybe narrowing the world is one way to survive. Keynes whimpers in his sleep. He’s so medicated these days, he’s stupefied, inert. Tomorrow, Dale will drop Peter at the Training Center, Caitlin at the high school, and Keynes at the vet’s. He closes his book. What did his fifth-grade teacher call it? His Permanent Record. Your past will follow you for the rest of your life as a public document. What to do? Once he’d wanted his face on a campaign button. What happened to all that? Lost heart somehow, never tried. He wondered how many other erstwhile political leaders were sitting alone tonight with their secret. Dale takes his nightly walk, but this time without Keynes. It’s what you don’t do that haunts you the most, he thinks. When he reaches the corner of Dal Paso and Navaho, where they always turn around, Dale stops, stares at the bright lights of the Allsup’s.
Back home, Dale brews his coffee and fills the thermos. He checks the locks, checks the children, cuts the lights. He undresses and slips into bed beside Theresa. She’s awake, but pretends not to be. He kisses her head. It’s just beginning, he tells her. Theresa doesn’t know what he means. The beginning of the end? What? You mean there’s more? More and more getting up, trudging to work, putting in the hours, coming home to cook, clean, iron, argue with a daughter who dates a boy who beats her, curses at her? More of that? What happened? Caitlin will be pregnant soon, and Theresa knows that if the monster ever lays a hand on her grandchild, she’ll see he’s put away, kill him if she has to. God, here she is at forty-one thinking about murdering people. Is it Peter she wants to kill? I
s that why she can’t sleep? Murder the boy who won’t grow up? They’ll be seventy, she and Dale, and they’ll be shackled with this lumbering child. She hates herself for feeling this way Why can’t she be noble, holy, like the selfless people they profile in the paper—couples who adopt houses full of handicapped kids? She regrets she’ll never have a romance with Dale. They’ll always be distracted from each other. She hears Peter open his door, walk toward their room. She tenses, she can’t help it. Dale tells her, Go to sleep, I’ll get him.
I’m living on the first floor of a three-decker on Grafton Hill. Spot stays inside mostly. I write at the kitchen table. Nicky and I just came back from a tour of the South in a rental car. Nicky took photographs; I took notes. I’m writing a novel about love and death in Mount of Olives, Louisiana, a small town in a Delta parish. We’ve got weddings and funerals, senility, genius, lust. Love. It’s all about remembering. There’s a boy named Adlai Birdsong in it and a child named Bergeron who can’t forget anything. In Mount of Olives there are thirteen cemeteries, a store called the Black & Lovely Grocery, three Baptist churches, a Holiness Church, and a Catholic church. There’s a movie theater, the Bijou, that runs one night a week. In summer, Lavelle Spencer sets up a huge fan by the ticket booth that blows mosquitoes away from the entrance.
I had dinner with Stoni and Arthur at the Thai Orchid. They’re engaged. Being with the family keeps Judi in my life, and I like that. Stoni looked great. She was calm. Arthur couldn’t do enough for her. Pulled out her chair, unfolded her napkin, kept asking if she needed anything. She told me she saw Ronnie on a TV talk show. All the guests claimed to be from other planets. Ronnie was the only one who looked normal, who wasn’t dressed in some Star Trek costume. But he was the craziest of them all. Stoni smiled.
You’d think I’d run into Martha once in a while. I’d like to. I try to. I walk up Elm Street past the Chancery for no reason at all. I can do this because I know our lives are separate now. I’d like to talk to her, see how she’s doing, tell her I care about her, and like that. It’s probably better for me that I don’t see her—keeps the shame, guilt, and regret right there on the surface like a rash—and it’s certainly better for her.
I’ve sold three stories in three months for a total income of six copies of three literary magazines. Sometimes I feel foolish, and then I remember what Judi told me—better to be hungry and foolish than fat and complacent. I don’t even understand complacency. It’s like a sinister force from the planet Quark. I write every morning from seven till noon. Then I go to the King’s Head Pub for lunch. They’ve got a new woman behind the bar who drives me crazy. She could be anorexic, she’s so thin. She looks like a boy, now that I think of it. I go to work at Our Lady of the Sea, come home around eight or nine, and write some more. And when I sleep I dream about my characters. In one dream Dale and I were in a field of switchgrass and sagebrush and saw two coyotes catch a house cat and eat it. Dale put his arm on my shoulder, said not to worry, that’s just the world and how it works. Don’t turn away from it.
LOVE WARPS THE MIND A LITTLE
John Dufresne
READING GROUP GUIDE
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Death is what keeps me up at night, and so death is what I write about. In fact, it’s only one of the horrors that keeps me awake, that and loneliness, grief, separation, and, well, that’s enough for now. We’re dying and we don’t want to be. Everything we care about slips away from us, everyone leaves. That’s the awful sadness at the center of our existence. That’s what I believe. And I believe it is our struggle against this brutal fact, against the reality of our brief lives and our immense losses that constitutes the beauty of life. So even in a book that I thought was going to be about love, I knew that death would creep in. I just didn’t know how.
I started with Laf and set out to write about a marriage in trouble because only trouble is interesting, and trouble between partners especially so—there’s so much history, intimacy, so much shared memory involved, so much vulnerability, so many expectations. What sets the story in motion is Laf’s sense that his dreams are about to become regrets. That’s what keeps him up at night. His anxiety is so intense that he is willing at first to sacrifice his marriage in order to pursue this dream of becoming a writer. He leaves his wife Martha, hurts her terribly, and throws their futures into chaos. Now I know that in fiction nothing is ever what it seems. I knew there was more to Laf’s story than he was letting on. I figured I’d be startled by some revelations and supposed the story would take some turns I had not expected. Still, I assumed that something like this would happen: As a result of his struggle, a protracted and anguished one, Laf would come to understand that his place was with Martha, that he loved and needed her, that he could only reach fulfillment, artistic or otherwise, with this woman who had shared his past and loved him dearly. That was the book I thought I would write.
But then Judi Dubey, a minor character I had assumed, quite unexpectedly told Laf that she had been a thirteenth-century Saxon mystic and began to relate a fascinating story of her past life. I thought, as Laf might have: What an interesting and curious woman! Neither Laf nor I believed that Judi had lived before, but then where did these vivid and resonant details come from? And why does she need to believe this? And I thought, well, now it will be harder for Laf to get back home. He’s entranced. But that will only make the story more interesting, his conflict more acute. He’ll have to dig deeper, struggle harder. And his return to his wife will be all the more compelling. But then Judi discovers she has advanced cancer.
Part of the joy of writing is discovering what turns up on the page each day. You live with these people, you care about their lives, you think more about them than you do about your own family. Your job is not to judge them, and it is not to let them off the moral hook. Your job is to witness their behavior, to hold them responsible for what they do, and to render justice to their lives.
Writing fiction is a humble art. I write stories knowing that I have no answers, but lots of questions. I write about what I don’t understand, hoping that in the writing, I’ll come to see what I think. I’ll muddle ahead to some insights, knowing that I will never really come to understanding or wisdom. As a writer this is how I make sense—try to make some small sense—of the world and my place in it. The purpose of a novel, I think, is to say this is what it’s like to be a human being, and this is how it feels. Well, love is what Laf doesn’t understand, so I began this particular story with Laf trying to figure it out. What is love anyway? Why do people who love each other hurt each other? And why does love, which is what sustains us, which always begins with such hope, so often fail?
—John Dufresne
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Love Warps the Mind a Little opens with an epigraph from W. B. Yeats: “But is there any comfort to be found? / Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” How does this relate to the themes of the novel? Does Laf find comfort? Does Judi?
2. Throughout the novel, Laf is writing a story about Dale and Theresa. How do the elements of that story comment on Laf’s own struggle? Discuss Dale’s change of character in terms of Laf’s change of character.
3. Judi and Laf deal imaginatively with their difficult lives. Laf writes stories; Judi remembers past lives. Discuss the similarities in these creative endeavors.
4. How does Dufresne perceive his characters, especially the minor characters like Ronnie, Pozzo, Hervé, Trixie? Does he offer any insights into their situation and troubles? Does he treat them sympathetically? If so, how?
5. Throughout the novel, Laf finds himself powerfully attracted to certain women: Judi, Pauline, strangers in an airport. What do you make of his behavior?
6. In the novel, Laf compares being in love with writing a story. How might this be true? In what sense is love a creative act?
7. On page 236, Laf quotes Judi, who says that everyone in therapy has a love disorder. Discuss this notion that love or distortio
ns of it are at the source of our emotional problems. Is this accurate?
8. What role do the minor characters play in shaping the story?
9. In the book we see people coping with life and love in a variety of ways: with therapy, religion, paranoid delusions, dreams, writing, visualization exercises, drugs. What do these activities tell us about the human condition? What is it that makes us human? Our bodies? Our hearts? Our minds?
10. What view of human nature does Love Warps the Mind a Little seem to express? Does Dufresne suggest a vision of an ideal world? What might that be?
11. On page 236, Laf makes a distinction between romance and love. Romance, he seems to say, is an ideal, while love is real. What do you make of his distinction? Do you agree with Laf that there is a vast difference between the two?
12. On page 296, Dale has this insight: Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved. Discuss this notion of goodness and self-worth being part of the ability to love. What does this say about the person who doubts his/her own goodness?
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