The epigraph I read to Imp B, like the book it opened, came from a distributed nowhere. I don't know why I used it. If I had to gloss it, I would say the line was about walking head-on into the parade of not-you, somewhere along time's dirt track. No matter how long and elaborate history's procession, the eye meeting it along the muddy road is always first person singular.
That book came to me during our first year in B., the richest year in my life. I thought we were happy then, but who can say? Our happiness may never have been more than bravery. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That was my favorite line, that pilgrim winter. I liked the idea that we grew to become our attitudes. And attitude, during our stay in B., felt like happiness, deep and artesian.
We were alone. For the first time in our lives, neither of us was going anywhere. We navigated from winter night to winter night, in a state where winter starts in October and rages on into May. In an apartment halfway along its forced march from genteel to desperate, we made a home too familiar for words.
Through those first mythic days, we met our neighbors. We sashayed around them in the laundry room and halls. We shook hands and took their business cards, with none to give in return. We folded origami mnemonics from the syllables of their names. Then we forgot the mnemonics.
No matter. People in our building did not want to be called anything anyway. That was why they chose the place. That was why we ourselves lived there. Every soul in that horseshoe courtyard wanted to be left to its private invulnerability.
The nearer the next man's dossier, the more easily we avoided it. A hole breached our bathroom ceiling into 307 above. It tore open in the shower steam, peppering our tub with drywall. We tacked a linen sheet printed with lime-green woods across the gaping wound. As good as healed.
We were each other's entire populace. Even job hunting was a shared delight.
"Here's one for you, C. 'Good communications skills.' "
"Um, Beau? I think they mean modems and stuff."
We listened to each other's stories. We improvised. We pulled repertoire out of deep storage. The books we didn't read out loud to each other we paraphrased at great length. And we read, reread everything that time had prevented us from reading properly until then.
I might linger over a printed paperback opening for an afternoon, wondering if I wanted to commit. For, once past page 10, I was obligated to stay the campaign, however sordid. I read essays, history, biography — things that would never in a million years be on the List because they weren't English or weren't literature. I commenced that million-and-a-half-word associative memoir that Lentz would harass me with by name, a dozen years later.
I began to keep a reading diary. Not very dramatic as turning points go, but there it is. A lifetime later, rereading these notebooks, I saw that the lines I copied out, the words I deemed worth fixing forever in the standing now of my own handwriting, clumped up with unlikely frequency toward the start of any new book. The magic quotes thinned out over any book's length. The curve was linear and invariable. Perhaps writers everywhere crowded their immortal bits up toward the front of their books, like passengers clamoring to get off a bus. More likely, reading, for me, meant the cashing out of verbal eternity in favor of story's forward motion. Trapping me in the plot, each passing line left me less able to reach for my notebook and fix the sentence in time.
C. read Buddenbrocks and Anna Karenina. She reread Little Women. Everything made her weep. Everything. Well before the last page, she would drag her heels. Her bookmark tracked across the spine of a paperback like Zeno's arrow, frozen in infinite halfway points on its way to the mark. The first four hundred pages zoomed by in two or three nights. The last forty could tie her up for a month.
When she did finish anything, it convulsed her. I remember her reading Ethan Frome.
"I thought every American high schooler had to pass a test on that book. Right before they quizzed you on the Constitution," I teased her.
C. shrugged. "Maybe I'm not an American, Beau?"
The day she finished, it turned cold. I was in the front room, on the overstuffed chair we'd saved from street-side collection. C. was in the bedroom, on the mattress on the floor. Out of dead silence, I heard her distress call. "Beau. Ricky." Soft and desperate, already lost, pinned under a mountainside of rock.
I closed the distance at reflex speed. She was propped up against the wall, her eyes rimmed red with salt, her fist shaking, pressed against her mouth. "Oh, Beauie. Give me another chance. I've been so selfish and awful. I can be better. I know I can."
This was from Ethan Frome, of all places. Ethan Frome.
Each workday, C. put on her navy blue uniform and walked across the land-filled fen between our apartment and the Fine Arts. There she stood for eight hours at a go, saving the masterpieces of world painting from a poking and prodding public.
Museum guard may be the most tedious occupation in the nation's job register. But someone neglected to tell C. She came home glowing with minute enthusiasms, discoveries that could be made only by staring at a painted surface for days at a time. In particular, she loved being assigned to the Fine Arts' chestnut Colonial collection. Too late, I heard in her love the deportee's thrill, the fascination with a country hers only by the thinnest accident of birth.
For the two of us, America went antique. In that city, at that time of year, people moved purposefully through the streets, hinged to their shadows. Their black coats seemed coal seams against gray snow. In silhouette, they passed for protagonists in modernist Czech novels. They packed down subway stairwells and through turnstiles. I packed along with them, on the way to the trade press office where I worked.
I imitated them for C. at night, when I came home. I mimicked the exchange of pleasantries. "We must dine some evening." "The Net National Income has experienced another sudden surge." C. insisted I had a future, either on stage or in a brokerage.
The city posed like one of those portraits C. guarded, a Whistler or a Copley. The subway trains — state-of-the-art, burnished, Asian — were at heart archaic trolleys. They hauled their human freight back and forth to garden suburbs with odd monikers. Cars darted through the maze of surface streets, tomorrow's Studebakers.
My computer magazine outfit sat inside a rustic steel-and-glass exoskeleton that made the surrounding buildings look even more antiquated. The cityscape was something an American postprimitive might do, a nostalgic century from now.
C. and I lived it in advance retrospective. We took long walks along the prow of winter, reconnoitering, registering everything. We ingested the ochers and burnt umbers, the tints that tipped us to the fact that the present was far stranger than it let on.
Only the urban poor refused to go aesthetic. They spoke in tongues, human or otherwise, debating themselves or whoever else would listen. They handed the two of us soiled pamphlets covered in Carolingian minuscule. Or they slouched asleep, grease- and blood-caked, in the back of sleek light rails, riding out to the docklands district of progress's trade fair.
On nights when the windchill permitted, when the bitterness of interplanetary dark toyed with its food by easing a degree, I walked home. I cut across the public plots, the ancient Victory Gardens, all their victories lost, forgotten, or squandered. There, bent women tilled the rows in windup planetarium ellipses. The city's native foreigners, waiting for spring to plant a new crop for next year's war effort.
I made my way through the garden, the days getting dark early, just after four. Over the fusty expressway bridge, I headed into the home stretch, closing in on the place C. and I had made for each other, from out of total accident.