The passport, I had noticed, was growing smaller, over the years, and changing fabric. I had learned from the dragon of the passport office that they even planned to diminish it, within a year or two, to the size and texture of a credit card. To avoid fraud, they said, but also, and there seemed to me an unconscious totalitarian longing in this, to serve, as papers required on one’s person in police states have always served, as permanent proof of citizenship, and of identity.
But in London, don’t you see, the phone rang. In London, on Hays Mews in fact, the phone rang. I was asleep. He said, You’ve left. I said, I haven’t. He said, You have.
But will they understand it if I tell it this way?
Yes, they will. They will surely understand it.
But will they care about it?
That I cannot guarantee.
I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence. Diana had also said, The only ones who helped us in those days were the Palestinians. But we had just met, and I didn’t even know who “us” was or what, helped with what, so I let it pass. And then, when only she and John and I were still at the table, she said, I understand everything about Greek drama now. And she told of having asked an old Greek in a little mountain village whether he had ever heard of Diana; she meant the goddess. He had replied: I never met her, but she was very beautiful; my grandfather knew her very well. Then she said, What I understand about Greek tragedy now is this: the Athenians went to three dramas in a single day, and at the end they were so exhausted, that was the catharsis. The exhaustion itself was the catharsis. She and John and their daughter had gone, it seems, to a therapy group, in Lausanne, where they live. And the daughter had gotten up, one of the first to speak, and said many things about her parents. John had gotten up to answer, doing so quietly, in his way and so as not to hurt his daughter, and crying as he spoke, which is not at all his way or the way of that sort of American. Then, it was Diana’s turn. She had looked around, she said, and thought, These worms, I can do this easily, these worms, particularly as I have been through a lot in my life, and now I am going to act, that is perform. But somewhere in the course of her speaking she was moved to tears, and when she had finished, the leader, knowing that this marked an emotional caesura for the whole group, called an intermission. And during the intermission the gathering broke as it were into three large factions, some with John, some with Diana, but a great wave bearing her daughter toward Diana, wanting reconciliation, a scene. Diana thought again, These worms. And, as her daughter was borne directly to her, crying, Diana said, “Not here.” But this is not about that. In the end, this is not about that, though that “Not here” had immense repercussions for me. This is about friendship, and my tantrum, and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time.
These are the categories: arbitrary, necessary, futile. Intimate, public. These are the characters, these are the events. Over here, are the strategies and theories. Cadences. And in London, after all, there were the phone calls. Sometimes I was asleep, sometimes you were.
This is a conservative, even a reactionary town, and yet, every year since anyone can remember, it has been the only town in the state to have a Labor Day parade. Frank and Marilyn, my nearest neighbors, are conservative, even reactionary voters. We became friends in the first week I moved here. Marilyn brought a flowering plant in welcome, stayed for coffee and a cigarette, then called to ask whether I would like to come to dinner the following night at five o’clock. Five o’clock, I thought, farmers’ hours, country people’s hours, although our farming neighbors, when I was growing up, I dimly recalled, had dinner more nearly at six or even six-thirty, and though I knew that Frank and Marilyn are not farming people. She runs a private kindergarten; he is an engineer. When I arrived at their house, there was for some time no question at all of eating. They were already drinking, and I joined them. When we did finally have dinner, hamburgers, I think, with spaghetti sauce and wine, it was long after eleven. And by the time I crossed the road, through the chill air, to my house, we had told each other more than some close friends of many years. Just as well. Our driveways are close enough for us to see who comes and goes, and, from time to time, hear bits of conversation, borne with improbable clarity on the night wind. What we would have known anyway, as neighbors, we know instead as friends. They are kind, educated, tolerant, church-going people, with their own history of trouble, bordering at one time on local scandal; and when I mention what I think of as their conservatism, quite apart from how they vote, I mean, for instance this: at odd hours, motorcycles and heavy trucks have begun of late to thunder at high speeds along our road, using it as a short cut between one highway and another. Apart from the noise, this back road, which is narrow and winding, was not meant for speed, or for the weight and width of trucks. In winter, especially, there are always crashes. When some neighbors suggested a petition, to post signs lowering the speed limit and also reading No Thru Trucks, Frank and Marilyn refused to sign. They so disliked the Sierra Club, Clamshell Alliance overtone, they said. This position carried in our neighborhood. All winter there will again, presumably, be crashes. But Frank says it is clear, at least, that this is not and will never be a Clamshell Alliance sort of town.
As a child, like many children, I sometimes received a diary with a little lock and key. Each time, and it cannot have been more than five times in all, I would begin, full of hope, on the first page, and immediately become dissatisfied. Not, certainly, on literary grounds. I never got that far. But on grounds (and this still seems odd to me) of penmanship. The thing did not look right. There was always some sort of blot or crooked line. I would try to erase, begin again, then give it up. This object, with its blurred start and months of empty pages, would lie around, be submerged under other books and papers, resurface, finally be thrown out. Only twice in my life have I come any nearer to the keeping of a journal. The second time was in my twenties. In an ordinary notebook, with no lock of course and with undated pages, I wrote daily, from one Sunday to Wednesday of the following week. I don’t know which month or year, although I remember that the time was summer. I know the weekdays only because I wrote them, in ballpoint, printed capitals, at the top of every page. What brought the effort to an end on Thursday was that I looked back. I read the entries for the past nine days, and I simply could not understand them. They might have been by a stranger and in code.