The Saturday has turned warm;it’s already October, winter is next.
Daniel drives past the familiar landmarks ofhis childhood.Putnam Lake, with little puckers ofsilvery light caught in its waves, ringed by tall blue spruce;Livingston High School, surrounded by cornfields, its asphalt parking lot in the process ofreceiving freshly painted yellow lines;the infamous ranch house where his old friend RichardTaylor lived with his drunken parents, where you could walk right in without knocking, where there was no housekeeping, no food, no supervision, where the lamps did not have shades, and where Daniel drank his first whiskey when he was eleven years old, smoked his first joint at twelve, and, that same year, got into a ferocious fist fight with Richard’s deafolder cousin.
TheTaylor place was one ofa dozen houses around Leyden where Daniel spent his time after school, where he slept on weekends, where he hid like a little desperado.In those grim but somehow fondly remembered childhood days—when he was his own man, needed by no one, respon-sible to no one, when the unanimous possession ofhis selfwas a pleasure that outflanked every deprivation and annoyance—he would rather have been anywhere in the known world than in his own home.He would rather have slept in school than in his parents’house.
His parents were latecomers to parenthood, vegetarians, Congrega-
tionalists, campers, tall gray people with solitary tastes for reading, hik-ing, and the brewing ofhomemade beer.They were in their forties when Daniel was born, and by the time he was a teenager they were nearly sixty, their habits thoroughly calcified.The foods they liked, the Mozart that soothed them, their ten o’clock bedtime and their six-forty-five ris-ing, their hour-long ablutions, their CanadianAir Force exercises, their aversion to moving air (no air conditioners, no fans),their daily porch sweeping, their dishes, cups, and silverware cleaned in kettles ofboiling water—these were the things that Julia and Carl Emerson revered.These were, in their minds, the cornerstones not only ofcivilization but ofsan-ity;without them they would be plunged into madness.
When Daniel entered their lives they taught him not to touch the vases, which antique carpets to avoid, which lamps were safe to use.He was not to run, jump, or shout.He was not to play the stereo console in their parlor, nor was he to use the electric typewriter, the adding ma-chine, the juicer, the blender, either ofthe vacuum cleaners, or the elec-tric toothbrushes.Above all, the back halfofthe house was off-limits; this was where the Emersons saw their patients.Here was the waiting room with its intriguing collection ofoffbeat magazines—fromPreven-tiontoThe Saturday Review—the dark walnut apothecary case filled with amber bottles ofvitamins, the vanilla plastic skeleton hanging from a hook, and the his and hers chiropractic tables—neither ofthem ever worked on someone ofthe opposite sex.Here came everyone from beefy back-strained farmers to neurasthenic housewives, here backs were cracked, hips were realigned, toes were pulled, fingers were popped, heads were yanked suddenly to the left or right, moans were moaned, and for some reason that Daniel never could fathom, people re-turned again and again.
Daniel continues his drive along the outskirts ofthe village.There are tourists in town today—the weekend, the splendid color change, when the maples turn to flame and the oak leaves are the color ofhoney.It strikes him as funny that the town has become a tourist destination;he cannot imagine how the day-trippers pass the time.There are jokey T-shirts for sale that say Paris LondonTokyo Leyden.There are home-made jellies to be purchased.But the bagels here aren’t as good as in the city, and the same goes for the breads, the pies, the croissants.Shoes, slacks, dresses, hats—all are cheaper and better in NewYork.The restau-rants are merely adequate.The antique stores have been shopped clean and now sell items from the1970s.Still, every weekend, except for the long dead ofwinter, there are at least a hundred new arrivals, parading up and down the two-block commercial center, with an ice cream cone in one hand and aT-shirt in the other, glancing shyly at the locals and de-lighting when someone nods back or says hello.
Not far from the high school is the town cemetery, where the headstones are thin as place mats and worn smooth and illegible over time.It was to this graveyard, in the company ofall that Colonial dust and the ceaseless squirrels, that Daniel used to go when there was no one left to visit and it was still too early to go home.With the marker ofone ofthe Stuyvesants to support his back, Daniel read the books ofhis youth— Salinger, Heller, Baldwin—and, in his thirteenth year, before his parents released him from their benign bondage and sent him offto a third-tier prep school in New Hampshire, it was here that he wrote poetry for the first and only time in his life.
They were not great poems or even good poems, they were not by most standards really poems at all.They were poetry as he understood it, the poetry ofwhich he was capable, and they ran through the changes of longing and desolation, seduction and heartbreak, trust and betrayal like a hamster on a wheel, celebrating lips he had never kissed, eyes into which he had never gazed, caresses he had yet to enjoy.They were for Baby, they were for Darlin’,they were for Janey, though he knew no one by that name, they were for Suzie, and though he did happen to know a Suzie, he did not love or even like her.In each ofthese poems, Daniel was alone, carrying within him a heart that ticked like a bomb.A great many ofthem began:And I walk…One wentAnd I walk through this night / with only one light / and that’s my heart, darlin’,burning for you.Another:And I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk /And wherever I go I’m looking for you.
But who was this“you”? She did not exist.There were girls in his daily world whom he liked and who seemed to like him, but they could not be fit into the staggering, narcoticized world ofhis desire, the atmosphere was not conducive, it made them shrivel and die.And then, one day, the longing was gone.He cannot remember a precipitating event.It just hap-pened, like the day he suddenly stopped believing in fairies and ghosts, or the day the notion ofSanta Claus was abruptly ridiculous.Weeks went by without him writing in his notebook oflove poems, and then it struck him that ifanyone ever came upon those verses the humiliation would not be survivable, and he brought them down to the river, thinking ofmaking a ceremony oftheir disposal, a kind ofburial at sea, but in order to get to the river he had to trespass across one ofthe immense riverfront estates and by the time he was at the water’s edge he heard the rumble ofa care-taker’s truck, surely on the way to roust him out, and he ended up tossing the notebook into the water wildly and running.
Now, as he makes a couple ofleft-hand turns that bring him ever closer to Iris’s house, he is remembering those mawkish scribblings for the first time in twenty years.
Side-arming that notebook into the river did not mean that from then on he lived in some anguished exile from romance;he was not like a priest who loses his faith and then becomes a drunk or a fornicator.He did not feel bitterness, he did not feel any loss.He simply knew better and it was over.Those feelings were like his milk teeth;his bite was stur-dier after that.And in place ofall that inchoate desire, he went on to other pursuits:public service, respectability, sex, money.His briefchild-ish dream oflove was over, and he went on.He had relationships.He had a life,by which people seemed to mean a certain accumulation ofdays and experience, all mortared into some kind ofshapeless shape by an adult gravitas.He went on to prep school, on to college, on to law school, on to a year traveling on the cheap in Europe, on to a year in Mis-sissippi working for a civil rights lawyer, on to Minneapolis for more public service, where he lived with the daughter ofa blind Norwegian piano tuner, a large, brown-haired girl with creamy skin and enormous eyes, who seemed to him like an old-fashioned dessert, the kind they serve you when you’re too sated to eat another bite, and on to NewYork, to Kate and Ruby, and on and on and on—but had he been walking an ellipse all that time? Because here he was again, not exactly at the spot at which he had written those rhymes twenty years ago, but certainly within shouting distance ofit.Around and around he’d gone, and now it seemed to all be coming to this:that phantom female, that ghostly girl, Darlin’,Baby, all those creatures ofhis longing, all those spirits oflove and desire whom he thought he had exorcised with the power ofplain old common sense, put in their place at the back ofthe class by irony, experience, and practicality, they had survived after all, they had not been cast out, they had merely shrunk back, they had hibernated, and now they are awake, they are swirling around and around, and they have fused into a single woman.