Not that you ever truly lose anything, of course — as Paul is finding out with pain and difficulty — no matter how careless you are or how skilled at forgetting, or even if you’re a writer as good as Saul Bellow. Though you do have to teach yourself not to cart it all around inside until you rot or explode. (The Existence Period, let me say, is made special for this sort of adjusting.)
For example. I never worry about whether or not my parents felt rewarded because they only had me or if they might’ve wanted another child (a memory-based anxiety that could drive the right person nuts). And it’s simply because I once wrote a story about a small, loving family living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who have one child but sort of want another one, ya-ta-ya-ta-ya-ta — ending with the mother taking a solitary boat ride on a hot windy day (very much like this one) out to Horn Island, where she walks on the sand barefoot, picks up a few old beer cans and stares back at the mainland until she realizes, due to something being said by a nun to some nearby crippled children, that wishing for things that can’t be is — you guessed it — like being on an island with strangers and picking up old beer cans, when what she needs to do is get back to the boat (which is just whistling) and return to her son and husband, who are that day on a bass-fishing trip but will soon be back, wanting supper, and who that very morning have told her how much they both love her, but which has succeeded only in making her sad and lonely as a hermit and in need of a boat ride….
This story, of course, is in a book of stories I wrote, under the title, “Waiting Offshore.” Though since I stopped writing stories eighteen years ago I’ve had to find other ways to cope with unpleasant and worrisome thoughts. (Ignoring them is one way.)
When Ann and I were first married and living in NYC, in 1969, and I was scribbling away like a demon, hanging around my agent’s office on 35th Street and showing Ann my precious pages every night, she used to stand at the window pouting because she could never find, she felt, much direct evidence of herself in my work — no cameos, no tall, slouchingly athletic golfer types of strong, resolute Dutch extraction, saying calamitously witty or incisive things to take the starch out of lesser women or men, who, naturally, would all be sluts or bores. What I used to tell her was — and God smite me if I’m lying almost twenty years later — that if I could encapsulate her in words, it would mean I’d rendered her less complex than she was and would therefore signify I was already living at a distance from her, which would eventuate in my setting her aside like a memory or a worry (which happened anyway, but not for that reason and not with complete success).
Indeed, I often tried telling her that her contribution was not to be a character but to make my little efforts at creation urgent by being so wonderful that I loved her; stories being after all just words giving varied form to larger, compelling but otherwise speechless mysteries such as love and passion. In that way, I explained, she was my muse; muses being not comely, playful feminine elves who sit on your shoulder suggesting better word choices and tittering when you get one right, but powerful life-and-death forces that threaten to suck you right out the bottom of your boat unless you can heave enough crates and boxes — words, in a writer’s case — into the breach. (I have not found a replacement for this force as yet, which may explain how I’ve been feeling lately and especially here today.)
Ann, of course, in her overly factual, Michigan-Dutch way, didn’t like the part that seemed to be my secret, and always assumed I was simply bullshitting her. If we were to have a heart-to-heart at this very minute, she would finally get around to asking me why I never wrote about her. And my answer would be that it was because I didn’t want to use her up, bind her in words, set her aside, consign her to a “place” where she would be known, but always as less than she was. (She still wouldn’t believe me.)
I try running all this end to end as I watch the ceiling fan baffle light around my room’s shadowy atmosphere: Ann wishes for … Horn Island … God smite my Round Hill elves … try burning this one …
Someplace far, far away I seem to hear footsteps, then the softened sound of a wine cork being squeezed, then popped, a spoon set down gently on a metal stovetop, a hushed radio playing the theme music of the news broadcast I regularly tune to, a phone ringing and being answered in a grateful voice, followed by condoning laughter — a sweet and precious domestic sonority I so rarely feel these days that I would lie here and listen till way past dark if I only, only could.
I lumber down the stairs, my teeth brushed, my face washed, though groggy and misaligned in time. My teeth in fact don’t feel they’re in the right occlusion either, as if I’d gnashed them in some dream (no doubt a dismal “night guard” is in my future).
It is twilight. I’ve slept for hours without believing I slept at all, and feel no longer fuguish but exhausted, as though I’d dreamed of running a race, my legs heavy and achy clear up to my groin.
When I come around the newel post I can see, out the open front doorway, a few darkened figures on the beach and, farther out, the lights of a familiar oil platform that can’t be seen in the hazy daytime, its tiny white lights cutting the dark eastern sky like diamonds. I wonder where the freighter is, the one I saw before — no doubt well into harbor.
A lone, dim candle burns in the kitchen, though the little security panel — just as in Ted Houlihan’s house — blinks a green all-clear from down the hall. Sally usually maintains lights-off till there’s none left abroad, then sets scented candles through the house and goes barefoot. It is a habit I’ve almost learned to respect, along with her cagey sidelong looks that let you know she’s got your number.
No one is in the kitchen, where the beige candle flickers on the counter for my sake. A shadowy spray of purple irises and white wisteria have been arranged in a ceramic vase to dress up the table. A green crockery bowl of cooling bow ties sits beside a loaf of French bread, my bottle of Round Hill in its little chilling sleeve. Two forks, two knives, two spoons, two plates, two napkins.
I pour a glass and head for the porch.
“I don’t think I hear you with your bells on,” Sally says, while I’m still trooping down the hall. Outside, to my surprise it is almost full dark, the beach apparently empty, as if the last two minutes had occupied a full hour. “I’m just taking in the glory of the day’s end,” she continues, “though I came up an hour ago and watched you sleep.” She smiles around at me from the porch shadows and extends her hand back, which I touch, though I stay by the door, overtaken for a moment by the waves breaking white-crested out of the night. Part of our “understanding” is not to be falsely effusive, as though unmeant effusiveness was what got our whole generation in trouble somewhere back up the line. I wonder forlornly if she will take up where she left off last night, with me flying across cornfields looking like Christ almighty, and her odd feelings of things being congested — both of which are encrypted complaints about me that I understand but don’t know how to answer. I have yet to speak. “I’m sorry I woke you up last night. I just felt so odd,” she says. She’s seated in a big wood rocker, in a long white caftan slit up both sides to let her hike her long legs and bare feet up. Her yellow hair is pulled back and held with a silver barrette, her skin brown from beach life, her teeth luminous. A damp perfume of sweet bath oil floats away on the porch air.