True North

by Jim Harrison

  Vernice was clearly high octane and I was perhaps low octane, at least in my own mind. Or I had chosen that path. Sprague in his journals had seemed a little nervous about what he called the “privilege of idleness.” After his young wife died he had dedicated himself to a life of “service” by school teaching. He had donated his checks but after a number of years he had become so repelled by the lack of curiosity in high school students that he quit to pursue his interests on the art of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest which struck me as an interest as far as possible from the family. I had never been idle which was not to say my preoccupations were truly worthy. The idea of privilege was another matter. I have heard that some realtors refer to clients with inherited funds as “lucky sperms.”

  Sitting in Deux Garcons from two until seven became comic. After a large number of customers left following the late lunch hour the outside tables were largely empty because a chilly wind had come up. I was a little anxious about taking up space so I kept ordering a bit of this and that after eating delicious chicken with lemon for lunch. Wine, fruit, coffee, cheese, tea, more wine, chocolate cake. Finally my waiter, a pleasant older man, told me that it was permissible to sit there without constantly ordering things. I had been thinking about Polly’s father whose legs had been crushed through improperly maintained machinery, a cost-cutting maneuver. Twisted into fleshy pretzels.

  I had read very little detective fiction so I couldn’t come up with a gambit to isolate Vernice. Wait until dark and see if there’s light in their window? Keep calling until she answers? Hang up if he answers or say I’m a cousin? I was hopelessly inept. A girl with an armload of schoolbooks sat close by drinking coffee and chainsmoking. I ordered a pack of cigarettes, the first in a long while. Her legs were lividly bare in her short skirt and I got an erection. Had I come this far to fuck Vernice? I loved her but that didn’t preclude the former. Was I a vampire that could get life only in the company of women? Probably. The company of men only exacerbated my own sodden concerns.

  I stood on a dark street across from their apartment which was 2A. The lights were on. The lights went out at eight o’clock. Vernice emerged with her tall, thin poet. They got in a tiny car and drove away. I had taken the bull by the horns, as it were, and bought a packet of stationery. I wrote, “Dear Vernice, Meet me at the Hotel Pigonnet at 10 A.M. to discuss what to do with Aunt Louise. Your cousin from Grand Marais. D.B.” Silly, of course. When I approached the darkened doorway to look for her mail slot there was an old lady glaring at me. What would Cary Grant do? I bowed deeply and gave her the envelope along with ten bucks in francs and asked her to give it to Vernice in secret all in jumbled French though she grinned when she got the gist.

  I walked back to the hotel with my stomach unsettled from the afternoon out. I sat before the open window as I had in Veracruz hoping to see the stars but they were dim from the ambient light. I sat there hoping that Vera would marry her schoolteacher lover and that Riva and Polly were doing fine at whatever. I was frankly lonesome and wondered why other than Polly my affections had sought such unrewarding possibilities. Unwilling tears formed when I thought about Laurie. They dried and then the same thing happened when I thought about Polly. This tear thing was new and I had the notion that new parts of my brain were becoming apparent to me without my help.

  I went down to the desk and asked if they might find me a taxi to take me out in the country to see some stars. “But, of course.” The idea seemed logical to the woman at the desk. She was about fifty and trim with a shy smile. There was an urge to jump over the desk counter at which point she would wilt into my arms, and after that would ensue one of those scenes that I read about in Henry Miller’s Sexus in college.

  The taxi driver took me up a valley on a narrow road that led into the mountains. He paused a moment and pointed at a small darkened house saying “Cézanne studio,” at which point I remembered why the name of the city of Aix-en-Provence was familiar. When I was young I used to leaf through my mother’s art books looking for nudes but still managed to read the text about the exciting but tragic lives of artists. Cézanne had managed to live a long life by staying down in Aix-en-Provence.

  The stars themselves were so close when I got out of the cab that the Milky Way was a filmy white blur. I was exhilarated in this bowl within the granite mountains that rose in slabs of gray. I walked along the road in the cool night air with a swelling heart half expecting the northern lights. I thought of nothing but the grandeur of the universe.

  Farther up the road there was a fancy restaurant and when we began to turn around to head back to town I suggested we have some wine to celebrate the stars. The cab driver had begun to absorb my buoyant mood and agreed. He turned off the meter and we walked through the half-full parking lot into the bar part of the restaurant where I ordered a Côte Rôtie from the wine menu, another wine my father admired. We were halfway through the bottle when I turned to see a group of eight diners come into the bar for brandy and coffee, among them Vernice and her poet who spoke in a diffident, chortling basso to their friends. Vernice immediately spotted me up at the bar. She approached as if not quite sure of herself. She was much thinner and quite pale.

  “What in God’s name are you doing here?” she said in a whisper.

  “Do I know you?” I was trying to joke but it didn’t work. She looked like she might faint so I added, “I left a note with an old woman at your apartment.” She nodded and left. I waved at her lover who was looking at me with subdued curiosity.

  Woke up at dawn after the sweetest sleep imaginable though decidedly nonspiritual in terms of dreams. I was sharing a roast chicken with Carla who was sitting in a baby’s highchair. I walked the mile downtown and sat on the back steps of the cathedral watching a large group of country people setting up a market in the square. A sign said the baptistry of the cathedral was established in 357 when the Romans were along the Mediterranean coast. The back doors of the cathedral were open and someone was up in the organ loft practicing Bach. The dense, thrumming notes hummed in the granite under my butt. My brain tingled with the music so that when I closed my eyes I thought I could see music. I descended into the marketplace and watched a man tending a tall vertical rotisserie with rotating rows of chickens and ducks dripping their baste down onto a three-foot-deep pile of vegetables and sausages. I thought that Marquette could certainly use one of these gizmos.

  Back in my room I sat before an open window wishing I had a French bird guidebook. It was two hours before Vernice was due assuming that she intended to see me. Both optimism and pessimism seemed irrelevant though I doubted if she did come that she would fall into my arms.

  I meant to put my entire house in order but to leave all of the doors and windows wide open. If I had a Bible and a concordance I would look up all of the entries for forgiveness. I would see my mother first and then my father. I had noted that Cynthia and my mother, and the few other women I knew well, appeared not to think in geometrical terms or in linear notions of junctures, halts, firm positions, specific numbers of days or months. As a man I had a great talent for order that was unrelated to reality. If I threw away my wrist- and pocket watches it was likely that I’d still always know what time it was. I seemed to lose my questionable abilities regarding time only while trout fishing or during one of my thankfully rare trances.

  At nine-forty-five my mind began to burble but not with the dread with which I had anticipated seeing Vera. Life was chock-full of errant possibilities. I would marry Vernice immediately but that was as likely as my climbing Mount Everest naked. She had the same iron self-determination as Cynthia. During a drinking period in college I had read for an assignment for a religious course Idries Shah on the Sufis and despite my supposedly high intelligence the experience was like sticking my head in a snowbank. Later in theological school I tried again and made minimal headway but Vernice may as well be a Sufi. Our eight days in the cabin had been a succession of alarming surprises and I now began to think of her as having been
my unlikely savior. She gave me a violent shove in the dark. Did I want another or need one? Naturally I would have given anything, as people say without knowing what they mean, to retrieve that physical ecstasy but I could see in the bar last night that it wasn’t going to happen.

  And it didn’t. The meeting was unclouded with desire except on my part. The desk woman called up and then there was Vernice at the door looking thin and brittle in slacks and a shaggy cardigan, her face a tinge of gray as if she had used ashes in her makeup. There didn’t seem to be a trace of southern Indiana left in her. Anticipating my concern she said she had had the flu twice since October which allowed her childhood asthma to return. She was discouraged about life without cigarettes. It was harder to write. Her lover preferred her skinny but she sensed their affair was nearly over. In two weeks he was going home to visit his children, one each by three marriages, and do a “very important” reading at the Library of Congress. They still loved each other on a “certain level” but he had decided poets shouldn’t live with poets. They both had known this when their affair had begun but thought they might be an exception.

  I was naive enough to ask why and she said it was because poets were essentially competitive and got on each other’s nerves if one was working well and the other wasn’t. He felt his star was a bit in decline while hers was ascendant though that hadn’t been very apparent to her. There were so many poets compared to the amount of attention available. The two of them were really quite poor because so much of his income went to child support plus alimony for the last marriage. She was always tired because she privately tutored French students in English for six hours a day. She had won two prizes of five hundred bucks apiece for her first book. Aside from her poems she was trying to write a sexy novel “in the manner of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ in order to make some money. As an afterthought she said that even the great Apollinaire had written a little pornography to support himself. She wouldn’t come back to the States until the fall when she had a tour of seven readings and a part-time teaching job in Columbia, Missouri. When her lover left she hoped to move over near Aries to join a quasi-lesbian friend from Chicago who had an apartment there assuming she could save enough for her share of the rent and food. She said she wasn’t complaining just “describing.” She loved living in France. She abruptly stopped talking and looked at me as if I were a stranger, then smiled and said, “I haven’t asked about you.”

  She was sitting by the window and seemed to be noticing her surroundings for the first time. She got up and looked at a small placard at the door to check the price of the room. “So?” she said as a cue for me to explain myself.

  I told her I had gone to Mexico to see Vera and then came here with the remote idea that we could begin seeing each other again. She was pleased with this thinking it quite romantic. I then blurted out that she had helped me a great deal by making my world so much larger than it had been before I met her. I became cautious about what I wanted to say next not wanting to offend her pride but told her I had been lucky enough to get the worth of my cabin back and wanted to help her out financially. I said I had no idea what she needed but I was going home the next day in order to straighten things out with my parents and had two thousand dollars left in traveler’s checks. It wasn’t much but I could send her something every month until she got on her feet and perhaps sold her novel.

  Now she was looking at the wall a foot in front of her face. “Why would you want to be my patron?”

  I repeated that she had enlarged my life and I was in her debt, plus I didn’t give a shit about money and it pained me to see her in distress.

  “You really mean that, don’t you? I forget how matter-of-fact you are.” She walked over and looked into the bathroom. “I haven’t had a shower in six months. We only have a tub. Do you mind?”

  I sat there embarrassed that a relatively small amount of money could mean so much to someone so deserving. I didn’t bother rehearsing the extravagances of my family. It had been rare for me to have the chance to do someone else some good. I opened a bottle of wine I had stowed in the closet in an ice bucket for a possible aid to seduction. My face burned and my fingers trembled. I stupidly thought of Mickey and Sylvia singing “Love Is Strange” but my mind heard Cynthia and Laurie singing it. Had I intended to stay in France if Vernice had consented to be lovers? I thought far ahead about the wrong things. I ruminated like a cow while Laurie and Cynthia jumped around singing and dancing. Now I trembled over a love that was out of the question.

  Vernice emerged from the bathroom fully clothed, spied the wine bucket, and laughed. “Where are the roses?” I momentarily felt huffy and it didn’t help when she gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You’ll have to wait until October. One at a time is more than enough.”

  She drank a scant ounce and then we walked to her bank because the desk didn’t have the cash. “Why don’t you just go to a college bar in Marquette and pick someone up?” she teased. I said that my tastes were too specialized and they didn’t include college girls. After the bank we held hands a few minutes, then kissed goodbye. It was cool and breezy with the wind seeming to push her down the street away from me.

  Back in my room I packed in minutes in order to take a cab to Marseille to make the connection for Paris. I felt a little murky but at the last moment I called the young woman from Thessaloníki in Paris. Her name was a variation of “Mary” that I couldn’t quite catch, Meriam I think. My morale rose when she said she had hoped I would call. She would stop by the hotel when she got her work done in the evening.

  On the train out of Marseille I figured I had to see my mother and thought I might drive all the way to Tucson with Carla. My mother thought of herself as Christian and I would ask her if she had forgiven my father. It was clear that she had been far more sinned against than me but that was on an abstract level and there were no scales on which to balance the matter. I had recently developed an urge to go against a culture which wishes to come to conclusions in order to rush on to what’s next. “We must move forward” was pounded into us. This, however, was radically different because I was now almost thirty-five years old and I wasn’t much more than a child when I perceived that something was terribly amiss. My entire project had been pure stuttering and I was slowly learning to speak.

  While waiting for Meriam I looked out in the night garden and listened to the chouette owl. The desk girl told me that sometimes the garden is visited by a larger owl called the “grand due” who comes there to feed upon the ample supply of pigeons, an angel of pigeon death. I drifted away in the glow of the ambient light above Paris, receding from my past life as if I were easing again out of the hospital room before my planned ankle surgery. After I completed my parent mission I needed a long dose of nothing before determining if my project, minus the considerable anger at my father, was worth completing.

  By the time Meriam arrived after ten I had drifted away far enough so that when she entered the room I hadn’t quite returned from the hummock in a particular swamp down near Seney. Carla and I had struggled out there on a hot afternoon in August. Beaver had dammed a creek and while we sat there on the hummock a family of otter was playing on the far shore. Having failed to catch one in numerous attempts Carla affected boredom with the otters. We were more than a dozen miles from any other human sign and I doubted if anyone had sat on that hummock before.

  Meriam carried a small picnic hamper and I thought my last French chicken would have to wait. Maybe I could raise round, plump French chickens in the U.P. I told her that I wanted to take her out for a nice dinner but she reminded me that I had paid for the cover charge and bar bill at the jazz club. Though she looked exotic in my terms her speech was very direct but slow. In fact she opened the wine and laid out our food in slow motion. She averred that she was a liberated Middle Eastern woman and knew that her casual boyfriend had a wife in Lyon but had never admitted it. I was at the same time famished and sexually excited. There was bread, several kinds of olives and chee
ses, hot peppers, and some kind of Greek marinated fish. She tried to be pleasant about it but was negative about the U.S. because the American students at the Sorbonne talked to her very fast about their country but didn’t seem curious about her own other than to inquire if they could live cheaply there. She had a tiny battery-operated transistor radio in her purse and tuned it into what sounded like Arabic music. She lit a joint and handed it to me. I took a rare drag and helped her clean up the table and then she went into the bathroom for what seemed like a long time but it was probably the effect of the marijuana. I was paralyzed with a daffy concern that I’d never get to make love again. I thought of lying on the bed but suspected the move might be too presumptuous. She came out fully clothed, turned out the lights except for the bathroom light peeking from the door, turned up the radio a bit, and said something to the night out the window, in her own language I presumed, and led me to the bed. I asked what she had said. “I’m telling my awful mother that I’m going to make love to an American,” she laughed. After a couple of hours I wondered why I was leaving Paris but I did.

  33

  In Chicago while waiting for my plane to Marquette I called my mother in Tucson. She said to sit still for a week and she would be back in Chicago to see her doctor. She didn’t say what was wrong with her but then as a reaction to her own hypochondriac mother she never mentioned her own illnesses excepting her earlier “phantom pain.” On the flight north to Marquette I was impatient enough to decide to visit my father in Duluth first. Despite all those wretched childhood lessons on being patient, usually to the advantage of the teacher, I was compelled to get on with it now no matter how ugly it might get.