We would not have had Christmas trees, except at my insistence. She would have let you grow up without Christmas trees. She knew that was terrible, and always gave in. Hanging the decorations, she acted as if it were the most pleasant thing possible. Then, the next year, she would not want a tree.
My guess about Haveabud is that he would do anything that was expected of him by an important person, but if that thing went unstated, he often overreacted.
It was more difficult than I thought to live with an artist. Is that the primary reason why things have sometimes been difficult?
She loved my ears. She would bite the ear lobes lightly, and nuzzle the ear with her nose, as if she meant to enter my body there.
I hated buzzing insects. She hated anything that crawled.
Enough of the past tense.
Today, the sun is shining with a brightness that would seem to obliterate the words written here. I like overcast days, when you don’t have to squint. Days of pale clouds.
There would not have been this house without your mother. Or any you, of course, without your mother. So that when she travels, it seems strange: Things seem to have been abandoned, to exist without context. I realize that when you agree to something, it becomes your world. I may be disingenuous in saying that she determined so much. What I am really saying is that she put a border around my life, as if we lived within a photograph.
Think of the things she has photographed that I have never seen. Sequential shots, like the blinking of an eye. Think of how many times I have looked at her face as she blinks, and how many times those eyes have closed and opened to my presence in her world.
There were years in which I could have devoted myself to writing if I had wanted to. It is commonly known that everyone looks back and regrets not following through on more things that mattered to them.
What will you think of these ruminations, which started out with such surety about the wonders of childhood, filled with Ben Franklin-esque advice to the wary? I look back and see that what I recorded as sound advice was often only a prediction. Probably I had in mind passing on something eloquent, pretending to myself that it would be useful, but secretly hoping you would be surprised by my sensitivity. Maybe I have ruined my chances merely by writing that sentence. Maybe written words could never guide you and this information about childhood could not mean any more to you than your mother’s photograph — of which you are so fond — of your shoes kicked off in a field where champagne glasses sparkle like huge diamonds and the rain has misted the grass and deteriorated the paper napkins as fast as acid.
Her feeling has been that people do things, then abandon the worlds they have created. She is interested in what remains, after the fact. No doubt she also feels abandoned. All artists are involved in personal quests, regardless of how well they seem to be investigating larger matters. Also — no different from cowboys or saints — they will be drawn to what reinforces them. I have recently read, and smiled over, this passage from Valéry: “It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary. This is how one recognizes that there is a soul at that moment, if at the same time one experiences the sensation that everything else — everything that would require a larger vocabulary — is mere possibility.”
We all like simple rhymes, spontaneous smiles. We are all so much alike, which is rarely remarked upon by artists.
I see now that what started as a private record took a trajectory of its own. I might have let it fly away, of course; or perhaps because it was dear to my heart I held it close. The trouble might simply have been that I was wary of creating something. A child — I would have created a child; the physical creation of something didn’t scare me — but words … perhaps I was reluctant to let language transport me.
It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. Should we simply record any thoughts we want, and judge them along the lines of Valéry?
Questions and question marks. This is being written at night, the light and the muttered expletives of the day having faded into darkness and silence. The dog curled nearby. Leaves brushing the window. An archetypal scene of the room in which the writer writes.
As always, the writer is secretly waiting for something else. Tomorrow night, your car in the driveway. You will close the door and walk toward a house that was once called “the retreat,” when we still lived in the city, but that now, when we are older, is the only home we own.
Though I have decided to give you a key and to tempt you to read my words, finally, I think that the flashlight I bring into the driveway will be your primary help, in terms of illumination.
Enough. There have already been enough conclusions. You have always been so smart about implied questions, ever since you first looked up at me and seemed, in that first glance, to take in everything I wanted. Then you became the questioner, not me. When I came into your mother’s life, I recall distinctly, you didn’t make a scene. You stayed calm, as any intelligent adult would in the face of an intruder. Maybe you thought I’d sneak off under cover of darkness, taking only the jewels — or the cameras, in this case. Maybe because you knew only what happened day to day and didn’t have a clear idea of what your life would be, you considered me not so much an intruder but a phenomenon, like a flash shower or a sudden gift of new Keds.
If your wide-eyed wonder was resentment, I never knew it. You came to love me — that much is clear. Though I have done other things through the years, I still think of myself as the person who knelt so many times to tie your shoelaces. Who needed to see them double-knotted, and to know that you were safe, again, from tripping. I could have identified your feet — and still could, I see them so clearly — in a lineup of a hundred children.
Off we marched — maybe even hand in hand — to whatever was ahead of us, which I sometimes had no more idea of than you. But you thought I did. You may also have thought that it came naturally to me to bite my tongue when I felt like cursing, or that it was easy to stop when the caution light flashed yellow, instead of gunning the car.
Do you see all this as altruistic? Of course it wasn’t that, however much I might like to imply, now, that it was. I didn’t see you as a hurdle: You were the simple stepping-stone to her heart. Then, to my surprise, I started to love you.
I remember taking you out in a brook to fish, and finding that the rocks were slippery, and that the water moved faster than it seemed to from the shore. I went back and got our shoes, yours and mine — I had to take care of you, after all — and endured your protests that only sissies wore shoes out on the rocks. Later, I got in trouble with your mother for getting your new shoes soaking wet.
Who was the real child? Who was naïve? Let the current rush around us, I thought, heady, as I often was, with my certainty that we’d stand firm. That we’d make it. Always. Every time we tempted fate.