On another occasion, when I noticed Sally staring at me in the undisguisedly estimating way she’s lately adopted, she said — wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something bad—“Sweetheart, have you ever thought of writing a memoir? Your life’s had a pretty interesting trajectory, if you ask me.”
This is not true at all. My life’s fine, in most ways, but doesn’t have a “trajectory.” It’s only the budding mental-health professional in Sally to want to compliment and encourage me — a form of freelance counseling. Though less likably, saying this gives the spurious concept of a “trajectory” a pointless life of its own. In other words, it gives me something different to deal with instead of what I am dealing with — which, happily enough, is not that much.
“Not really,” I said in reply to the memoir-trajectory suggestion. I was at that moment on my knees, tightening a threaded drain-collar under the kitchen sink, where the coupling had leaked and rotted the floorboards. I wasn’t being completely truthful. Years ago, when my career as a novelist went south, and before I signed on to be a sportswriter in New York, I’d thought (for about twenty minutes) of writing “something memoiristic” about the death of my young son Ralph Bascombe. At that time, all I could come up with was a title, “In the Hands of a Lesser Writer” (which seemed merely accurate), and a good first line, “I’ve always suffered fools well, which is why I sleep so soundly at night.” I had no idea what that meant, but after writing it, I had nothing else to say. Most memoirists don’t have much to say, though they work hard trying to turn that fact into a vocation. “Truth is,” I said to Sally from up under the sink, “I’ve been decommissioning polluted words out of my vocabulary lately. You may not have noticed. I’m keeping an inventory.” I cocked my head around and smiled up at her from the kitchen floor like a happy plumber. I didn’t want to dismiss her suggestion out of hand, though neither did I want to give it serious thought. I knew that my decommissioning words could very easily make her think I was unhinged. She already believes that because I had a happy childhood, I’ve probably suppressed a host of bad things (which I hope is true). Any thought of saying I was also now jettisoning friends would’ve made an even more airtight argument for my holding on to a “secret grief”—something I have no evidence of and don’t believe.
She gave me another one of the “looks”—hip thrown, mouth mumped, brows worried, arms crossed, right foot wagging on its heel, the way you might stand in line at Rite Aid when things were taking too long.
“Will you tell me something?” Her thumbs began touching the tips of her fingers on both hands — doing it, then doing it again, like a compulsive.
“I’ll try,” I said, back tightening the threaded collar on the sink drain with a pipe wrench four times bigger than I needed but that once belonged to my father and thus was sacred.
“What do you think of me?”
Cooped up under the fetid sink — plastic cleanser bottles, astringents, nasty sponges, Brillo pads, colorful scrubbers, a couple of grimy mousetraps, and the sweet-smelling yellow-plastic garbage pail unhealthily near my face — I managed to say, “Why do you want to know that?”
“Things can change,” she said. “I know that.”
“Not everything,” I said. “That’s why most memoirs aren’t any good. It takes genius to make that fact interesting.”
“Oh,” Sally said.
What I thought she really meant by asking such a question for no good reason was: “What do I think of you?” It’s not an unusual question. Married people ask it night and day whether they know it or not, especially second-tour veterans like us. They just rarely say it — like Sally didn’t. I was being routinely evaluated. It happens. But I still didn’t want to write a memoir. Reading for the blind and welcoming home heroic soldiers at the airport is plenty enough for me as “my contribution”—and therapy.
“I love you,” I said, as the collar snugged satisfyingly against the pipe and bit into the white silicone I’d applied.
“Do you really think you do?” Her pretty head and face and mouth and eyes were above me. Possibly she was looking out the kitchen window at our snowy back yard. Our lawyer neighbors had swagged tiny white Christmas lights all through the leafless oak boughs. Their back yard glittered and shone. They are party givers.
“I think it and live it,” I said, fingering the pipe and the emulsion for a guilty hint of moisture, and finding none. I began backing out with my huge wrench.
“I love you. I…” Sally started to say something more, then paused and stepped aside so I could climb up, holding the lip of the sink. “I guess I’m under a strain with my clients. I feel a little incognito.” She took a sip from a glass of Sancerre she’d poured without my knowing it. Tiny tree lights outside were twinkling in the afternoon gloom of mid-December. “You’re not grieving at all, are you?” A tear in her left eye but not her right. Her wonderful asymmetry. One of her legs is also slightly shorter than its mate — and yet perfect.
“Not this pig,” I said. My old Michigan joke. “I’m the happiest man in the world. Don’t I oink it?”
“You do. You oink it,” she said. “Just checking. Sorry.” And that seemed to do the trick.
WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNING, CHRISTMAS EVE day, I found myself thinking of Eddie Medley. Something in his voice — the phone message and on the radio — hoarse, frail, but revealing of an inward-tending-ness that spoke of pathos and solitude, irreverence and unexpected wonder. More the tryer than I’d first thought, but caked over by illness and time. Even in a depleted state, he seemed to radiate what most modern friendships never do, in spite of all the time we waste on them: the chance that something interesting could be imparted, before-the-curtain-sways-shut-and-all-becomes-darkness. Something about living with just your same ole self all these years, and how enough was really enough. I didn’t know anyone else who thought that. Only me. And what’s more interesting in the world than being agreed with?
But still. Nobody wants to see a dying man — not even his mother. Had I thought one thought about Eddie prior to now, he’d have been on the list for jettisoning. But since I no longer have to do anything I don’t want to do, feeling an active, persistent sensation of reluctance can become a powerful source of interest all its own, after which doing the supposedly unwanted thing can become irresistible. As old Trollope said, “Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed.” I could at least call Eddie on the telephone.