In Kansas City, I went to the St. Paul’s community breakfast. We ate in a sunny, high-ceilinged hall. Afterward, I looked through the doors into the church. Blue stained glass windows rose above the altar. Behind me, the breakfast line kept growing. It had been a good meal. A man came up and asked if he could talk to me. I thought that he might be involved with the church and, seeing the way I stared inside, might try to talk about God, but he was only asking me to dinner. Dinner seemed a fine offering to make to a woman eating breakfast at a soup kitchen, but I was leaving the next day.
Outside someone asked, Where is your man, where is your boyfriend?
I went to an exhibit on hunger at a county art museum in a Kansas town. The town’s soup kitchen was in the center with a large sign that said Welcome to All. Many soup kitchens didn’t have signs and weren’t at the listed address, were instead set farther back, behind another building. In the exhibit in this town, the artist had taken pictures of people who had gone hungry and interviewed them. They had talked about their lives, about what the experience of going hungry had been for them. The artist had traveled for years working on the project. There were forty or fifty black-and-white portraits, each with the person’s story told through headphones. I couldn’t listen to all of them, so I picked people based on their faces. They talked about their lives, how they had become homeless, what that had felt like to them. I wanted to find someone intelligent, someone who would tell me something about being poor and lost. It was nice when they simply talked. Mostly I put headphones on to hear a voice, and to hear how they told a story, how they summarized an experience that must have been chaotic and something that still hadn’t ended for them.
Afterward, I tried to explain to my mother that I was happy I went, though I didn’t think it was effective art, as it was too compassionate. Can something be too compassionate? she asked. I said that art can end up being compassionate — because you’re trying to communicate to people and that’s a compassionate act — but making it is often unkind. Artists take images and stories from people without telling them, and artists are doing it for their own ends, or for the ends of art. Even if they have morals or set limits, they are still taking from people. Their interest in another’s life is often for themselves. This artist didn’t want to do this. He wanted to portray these people as they were, and, in that way, it was a good study, but I wanted more. I wanted to know how he saw these people. I wanted him to forget who they were.
The question started to become what was effective art about the hungry or the homeless, and there wasn’t an answer. I took from everyone on the trip. I took meals and stayed for free with friends and strangers. I was patient and present with the poor — the people in the kitchens and on the street — but I was shut off with most others. I was tired after the kitchens. My openness meant someone always talked to me. There was a woman no one would go near. She sat next to me. She didn’t touch her food. I kept eating. You’re hungry? she said. The food is good, I said. When I stood, she hugged me, feeling her hands along the sides of my body.
I wasn’t doing any good, I knew. I had liked the artist at the county museum, his description of hunger and his project, but I didn’t think he thought he was doing good, either. He could have done more had he not been so faithful. They were only people after all. When you travel you see how many there are, how they fill whatever place you go to. It was hard to see the children in the lines. It wasn’t hard to see the adults, but it was hard to see the children.
Later I dreamed that I was teaching again. That I was in a classroom with a circle of students. I hadn’t been able to get a teaching job that year. In interviews I was vulnerable, scared, and trying to disguise this. I missed teaching. Missed being alone in a classroom with students, trying to do my best for them, which was, in the way those things often worked, never enough. When I got to St. Louis, I let myself into the apartment of a stranger who had hidden a key for me. I curled onto the iron bed in the spare room and called my lover. I told small stories about what I had packed, and about looking in the thrift store for a pair of lighter shoes and another shirt. It wasn’t like me to repeat stories, but I kept repeating those. My mother had left the week before and I was more afraid than I had expected. He wanted me to come back. There were times when my stubbornness, my ability to press on, made life harder, when it would have been better to let things fall apart, to go home, and I wondered if the trip had become this.
I was thinking of King’s bookstore in Detroit. How, when I walked in, the woman behind the register had said, Oh, you’ve been here before. When I said it was my first time in Detroit, she said, There’s someone who looks just like you then. Hours earlier, when I was in the street, looking at a ruined theater, a man had stared at me, and said, You work at the restaurant? No, I had said. So I asked the woman behind the register if she knew anything about my double. Does she work at a restaurant? I said. She didn’t know. She felt that I had been in many times before, and so hadn’t explained how they organized the books.
I looked for the authors I always looked for, but they didn’t have them. Instead, they had authors with the same last name. Looking for Denis Johnson — trying to find the old edition of Jesus’ Son—I found ten other Johnsons, many of them women. It was the same with Walser. It was as if the famous authors didn’t exist, and there were only the unknown versions. I found an old edition of a Thomas Bernhard novel and so I selected that.
I passed a clergyman leaving with a pile of books. The pile went up to his chin. Later I saw him again, walking down the aisles. I even went to the religious section for a moment, but couldn’t understand which book to buy.
The woman who looked like me remained a stranger, as I left the city the next day. I retained an interest in secondary authors, the ones with the same last name as the people I was looking for, and bought, in one bookstore, perhaps I was in St. Louis then, a pretty book called Two Views by a German named Uwe Johnson.
In St. Louis I sat outside a Laundromat while my clothes washed. A man approached. He was looking for his phone and needed me to call a friend. I called and said that I was with Robert and that he wanted to know what his phone number was. The woman on the other line asked if I was a friend of Robert’s and if he was okay. Yes, he’s okay, I said, I’m here with him at the Laundromat. She started to ask more. I was worried she would ask to speak to him. I didn’t want to give him my phone, so I said thank you, and hung up, and handed him the number I had written down. Thank you, he said. After that I walked to an apartment where I was staying with people I didn’t know. The windows were closed and while outside it had been sunny, inside it was cold and quiet. I curled on the bed and called my lover. We spoke for some time. I think mostly I talked about my fears.