16
In the winter, the grounds crew stacks canvas tarps on wooden pallets next to the greens. On the nights there might be a freeze, they spread out the tarps on the greens to protect the grass. In the morning, the canvases are white with frost, the fabric stiff from the cold, frozen in undulating waves, a meringue. In the morning, as the sun warms the course, the crew folds up the tarps again, revealing the brilliant green greens in their organic organ shapes set in the still frost-white fairways. The crew goes from one hole to the next, the first foursomes playing patiently behind them.
17
A deer came with the house. It is life-sized and painted. Over the years its cement flesh has rotted. The iron tendon of its rear leg is exposed and rusted. The velvet of his antlers has worn away, leaving the branches of corroded rebar. In the spring and summer the deer is enveloped by the creepers and vines that clad him in a kind of topiary coat he sheds in fall. His flat, staring eye fixes on me as I lounge in my metal chair in the driveway. The deer seems alive because the foliage around him is alive. He seems to move since the setting he poses in transforms day to day. Or maybe he is moving. He is being tugged on by the ivy, bullied by the tendrils, slightly shifted over time, sifting into the forest behind him. A visitor will be surprised, mistake the deer for a real deer surprised by the visitor. I watch them watch each other. Both hold perfectly still, waiting for the other's next move.
18
Through the picture window, I can see through the trees to the ninth green where golfers in pastel outfits and oversized hats take turns putting. Behind me is another vista. The long wall of the living room is wallpapered with a mural which depicts, in three colors, an elegant antebellum mansion set on a rolling plantation sward. The edges of the house are smudged by ivy and draped with wisteria. The weeping trees are bearded with moss. There are no people in the picture, so it is hard to say whether the picture represents a ruin or not. It attempts to capture, I think, in its gestural, impressionistic style the indigenous Romantic nostalgia which hereabouts is so deeply layered. You would think the wallpaper is just another example of that longing. But look closer. It's easy to miss. In the front lawn of the ancient house is the green puddle of a putting green and in its center a vertical brush stroke which, at first, you thought was meant to be a sapling or an indication of the breeze, but now on closer inspection turns out to be a pin, its checkered flag snapping in an invisible wind.
What I Want to Telclass="underline" A Sequence of Rooms
A Room
"What do you want to tell me?" Doctor X asks me. I am in an office room, an office room very much like my own office room. It has a desk, a desk chair, and some chairs. The overhead lights, a panel in the false drop ceiling, are off. The desk lamp is on as is a torchiere in the corner, its halogen humming in the silence that follows the question. What light there is sifts through a drawn blind on the window. When I moved to S four years ago, I looked up the city in the places-rated guides and found it ranked first in only one category. S, with its month or so of scattered days of available sunlight, days bright enough to cast one's shadow on the ground, is the only place to live if one wishes to avoid skin cancer. The city is famous for its cold as well. I want to tell him about when I moved to town what a colleague wrote on the title page of his book when he autographed it for me. "Welcome to S," he told me. "With warm regards, W. P.S., You're going to need all the warmth you can get!"
The Same Room
"What do you want to tell me?" I find the question hysterically hilarious but not so as the man who asked me, Doctor X, would know. In a word, I am depressed. I think of that word, depressed, as one of his words. My words have yet to arrive. He doesn't know a thing about me yet as I haven't told him a thing, and I am sitting stone still in his office thinking about what I have to tell him and how funny that is since what I have to tell him is about telling. For the last twenty years, I have made a living, more or less, telling stories, always imagining an imaginary audience prompting me to tell a story with a question like this. And I have been teaching students the last twenty years, telling them how to tell stories. And now the last year and a half I have been telling the same story about something that happened a year and a half ago, to a variety of people-investigative committees, administrators, colleagues, reporters, hearing examiners, students, friends who have called. And every time I tell the story of the thing that happened a year and a half ago, that occasion of the new telling, that version of me telling the story and the way I told it that particular time, becomes attached to the bigger story, the ongoing story, so that each time I tell the story there is more of it to tell, and when I am rehearsing the story for someone new, as I am about to do now for Doctor X, I am also not simply telling the story but paying attention to myself telling the story so that the next time I tell it I will remember to add the details of the last time I told the story, the way the room was, its light and furnishings and the person or persons there, so that those things can be incorporated into the next time I tell the story.
Still in the Same Room
What is so funny is that I have, with great authority, told my students all about where to start a story, even using Latin to give it a special patina of power. In medias res. In the middle of things. I tell my students of this ancient technique. How to go backwards from there in order to go forward. Funny, then, that I have started here in this room, in the middle of things, to tell the story again, this time to you who are reading this story. Funny, too, that when I was in the doctor's office and when he asked me the question "What do you want to tell me?" I, a person who makes a living, more or less, telling stories and teaching other people how to tell stories, was silenced for the moment by the existential nature of the task. That is, that we must tell stories in some order since our words line up one after another and accumulate and are read here in a conventional sequence from the top down, from left to right, are followed step by step. Now, I am in this room because I am at the end of one rope of words. I wish at this moment I could tell the doctor what I have to tell all at once, simultaneously. Though it is true that the events that have led me here happened in a sequence, so much of the sequence now seems repetitive, glossed, as if I have been polishing a table and a flat surface has taken on this depth. Rooms within rooms. I sit there. It is like a pen held to paper, this story I have to tell, the stain of ink spreading, the color deepening everywhere all at once. And I have no words, no means to make them tell. Not a line at all. A dark blot spreading.
Another Room (Versions)
I am not in this room. It is the end of March and dark. A party at a student's house. A poet, D, in my department, drunk, calls a woman-not his student but a student in the department-a name and throws a drink in her face. Subsequent retellings of the events of that night would add detail, more or less, because the people there were poets and fiction writers, narrators all. It was night and dark. There was a visiting poet who later, back home in Idaho during the investigation, refused to ever tell his story. Versions vary but some say he said or didn't say something about the woman's breasts or D said or didn't say something about her breasts to the visiting poet or to the woman. Which did or didn't spark the woman to say something or not to D who was either hurt or mad by what was said or not said. He threw the drink and the liquid hit the woman, everyone agrees. But there are versions about what was said by D, the words delivered with the gesture in the air with the alcohol. I was struck later, on April Fool's Day, when I heard a version of the events for the first time by phone along with the news that the student had filed a complaint of sexual harassment with the university, by the gesture itself. I was struck by the gesture itself, the throwing of a drink. How artificial it seemed. How like something self-consciously cribbed from a movie. The words that were, or, perhaps, were not uttered, how they seemed, even then, the first time I heard them, so scripted and rehearsed. And I thought of Henry James, the great chronicler of the tragedy of the broken teacup, who wrote that stories reveal themselves through selected perception and amplification.