So I did nothing. For three years, I neglected the place, only having the small patch of lawn beside the path mowed by an old man who said he had always mowed it. But the man from whom I bought the place had told me that the upper pond needed to be dredged every few years, when it filled up with silt. Late one summer, when there had been a dry spell, the waterfall was silent, the lower pond was nearly empty, and the upper pond so full of silt, rushes, maybe reptiles that, when its four surprising ducks had gone, it became a source mainly of mosquitoes. I looked in the yellow pages. Found contractor. Found excavating contractor, Lucas Scott, on a road four miles away. It was Sunday. I called him. He arrived within the hour. He said virtually nothing, but his estimate was low; I really liked him. Two days later, there was Sidney, a Korean veteran I thought, though I never asked, driving the enormous backhoe. Arrived late in the afternoon, churning up whatever there had ever been of lawn, making smithereens of flagstones. Parked that huge, thundering, ringing machine, with its hand (as the hands of those machines are always parked at night) knuckles to the ground. Oiled it. Left it there overnight. The elbow of it towering over my house against the moonlight. The next day, Sid was dredging silt, tons and tons of silt, and placing it behind a line of enormous boulders; twelve huge trucks arrived all day and dumped those boulders, shaking the earth for miles around. Sid placed them in a line, where I asked him to, with that great, heavy, precise, iron hand. I had no notion what an immense thing it is to change the contours of even the smallest pond, or for that matter to divert a flow of water. Neighbors I never knew came, while the machine thundered, and its safety device clanged warnings, and the boulders shook the earth. Neighbors came to watch, and to make remarks, also dire predictions. When the first day was over, the machine looming in the dark again at rest, I saw the silt, the line of rocks, a still unplaced heap of boulders, the flagpole which the machine had plucked like a daisy and replanted elsewhere. Sludge. And I thought, If this is the externalization of a psychological state, I am in more trouble than I ever knew.
Let me just say that I
No.
What do you mean, No? Let me just
No.
No?
No. I’m tired of it already. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to tell it. I want no part of it at all.
Well then what
Just leave me alone.
Well, then I can’t
Don’t apologize. Just let it pass.
But I.
Go away.
On the plane, when I last went away, the movie had long flickered out, those passengers with whole rows to themselves were sound asleep, others sat, staring, with their blankets and their little earphones. The man a seat away from me bought me a drink, gave me his card, and said that, though he had been a year too young for the Korean conflict, he was the third member of his family to have served in the Marines. His grandfather had been an only son, so had his father, so was he. All had been Marines, until they came home, married, and entered the family business — factories that made metal containers, cans. Did I favor an all-volunteer Army? he suddenly asked. I hesitated, then said No, I preferred the draft, it seemed more fair. Well, he said, ordering another drink, he had just spent days with procurement officers at the Pentagon. They wanted him to devise a can for what used to be called A rations, a container such that when rations were dropped from airplanes to ground troops there would be no breaking or crumbling of Saltines. It was impossible, he said, his factory simply could not do it. Must there be Saltines? I asked. Yes, he said. An all-volunteer Army has its culinary demands. On the way back, another man in his mid-forties asked me whether I would mind watching his hat-box. We were at Heathrow. I had not seen a hatbox since I was a child. He said he was bringing a hat as a present to his wife, but that there were also heavy objects in the hatbox. He wanted to run over and say goodbye to his father. He and his father, he said, never took the same flight. Family policy or company policy? I asked. He had given me his card by then. It showed him as treasurer, his father as president of a conglomerate. Company policy, he said. Then, while I, against all my resolutions, ate the awful airline lunch, and he drank, without any visible effect, six vodkas, he told me that he too had been a Marine, and that his wife was a private detective. The wife the hat was for. His grandfather, he said, had invented many things, including the x-ray equipment with which the family company began. One morning, many years ago, a distinguished surgeon had been discussing with this grandfather the problem of tuberculosis and the poor. Was there not some way, the surgeon wondered, to make chest x-rays inexpensive and also, since it was often difficult to persuade uneducated people to go to hospitals for examinations, to make the x-rays available to the poor in their own neighborhoods? The grandfather, who was already rich in those days, not only invented equipment for inexpensive x-rays; he made it mobile, and sent it, on wheels, to all the city’s neighborhoods. In all the decades since then, his company had provided the x-rays free. On a summer evening, a few years ago, one of the x-ray wagons was hijacked by a group of Puerto Rican radicals, the F.A.L.N. Let me say, this isn’t a matter of how I see things. This is what actually happens: going over Saltines and the all-volunteer Army, coming back x-ray wagons hijacked by the F.A.L.N. And the thing of course is this, that to me my life is serious. It is just that, I don’t know, the reality I inhabit is already slant. In the sense I think that Emily Dickinson meant by Tell it true but tell it slant.
Not here, Diana said. This is about friendship, and my tantrum, and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time. One would never have guessed they were a couple. She seemed so much older, of no clear age, but of another generation, it seemed certain, than he was. She was dark, heavy, in some way altogether ancient beautiful, by birth and accent Greek. He was slight, slim, boyish, by accent and manner unmistakably New England; well-traveled, though, bright, worldly, wearing his parka, over sweater, tennis shoes, and jeans, against the wind. One would have thought him, at the very oldest, twenty-eight. When it turned out, hours after the first introductions, incompletely understood, that they were, in fact, a couple, John and Diana Cummings, it turned out as well that he was, must be, from his first accounts of his life and education, forty-five, and she, it became clear, could be no more than ten years older. Even then, they seemed so oddly matched, so unmatched, that one thought they must have met and married only recently. He, seeking in his boyishness a mother, perhaps, or a guardian. She, seeking a son perhaps to look after and protect. They had, in fact, been married more than twenty years. They had two daughters; also, a son, of whom they rarely spoke. Here’s what happened on the first evening, at dinner. Somebody asked me what I was working on. I said, A piece about the American passport. Ah yes, said the Austrian photographer, a good subject. And she told of her travails in being admitted to the United States. She was asked, of course, whether she had been a Communist, but also whether she had ever committed adultery. What a question, she said. If I were a Communist or an adulteress, did they think I would say yes? I spoke of the belief I had been brought up with, the particular trust and belief in the American passport. And of how incomprehensible it was to me that any person, government, or bureau should treat it lightly or foolishly, in the matter of regulation, or in any other matter at all. I mentioned that I keep, that my family have always kept, constantly renewed and valid passports. Then it struck me, briefly, vaguely, that, in the matter of trusting and not trusting one’s country, a constantly renewed passport cuts both ways. But by this time, Diana had mentioned her own passport, her Greek passport, which had been revoked on account of her activity abroad against the junta. She had, nonetheless, managed, with courage and with an anomalous French passport, to keep traveling, in and out of Greece, but also, once, to Turkey. I asked her about her colleague, the Portuguese feminist and journalist, who had just published a short novel about her lover, an Armenian poet, who died in a Greek prison. And Diana said, Yes, we wanted her to write about another prisoner, but Maddalena insisted it be he. Then, she laughed. In those days, she said, we still believed in publicity, that it matters. She laughed again. I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence.