All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (12 page)

In an open swath of grass the sun-bleached bones of an animal, the size of a small dog, lay in the very shape in which it must have died—except the skull, which was a foot away and facing back upon the rest of itself, in terror or bemusement it was hard to tell. We noted this and moved on, a tiny fissure in the texture of the day.

In bed that night she said, I don’t want to lose control. Not yet. If I let you get me off, everything will change.

Hasn’t it changed already?

I mean really change.

She said every decision she’d made in the previous three years was now called into question. She doubted that anything she’d done was due to passion. With her boyfriend she’d found comfort, someone who wouldn’t challenge her, who provided stability and familiarity—the safe and reliable college beau. So much for stability, reliability. She’d gone with him to Seattle after college to escape the hard choices of life out of school, when suddenly all of one’s options are narrowed, when you finally have to figure out who to be. She’d wanted a sabbatical from decision making. She’d wanted a sojourn of sea-smelling air and Asian-Pacific cuisine, a lush landscape of emerald-green. Now something inside of her was ignited, and she wanted more. Her mind was on fire and her body with it. Her head crackled with ideas. She wanted to write for real. She wanted to create again. Her master’s program in Virginia challenged her to think more deeply. Her boyfriend’s departure and betrayal liberated her to feel more intensely.

So this is what it feels like to make love to a liberated woman, I said.

I’ll show you a liberated woman, she said.

After she’d shown me, I told her that every decision I’d made in the past three years could be traced to the death of my brother. I recounted how one of my uncles had mentioned that I was the likelier candidate for a self-inflicted death; I admitted that although his death had been unbearably sad in the beginning I’d found a way to take a kind of grim pleasure in it. It was the black heart of my life; it gave my life a bleak grandeur it would have lacked otherwise. I’d come to treasure that grandeur. Careless bliss and unspoiled contentment were for the simpleminded.

He had revealed the secret passageway off to the side of the life we all led. He’d pulled the curtain on the central fact of existence, which until then I’d failed to comprehend as more than an abstraction: life was optional. From the far end of that passageway he beckoned, mutely suggestive, wrapped in mystery. This was the unmentionable secret at the center of my days in the time since his death: the fact that he was always with me, though dimly remembered and void of substance, like a phantom limb.

So this is what it feels like to have a threesome, she said.

I’ve never known anyone to make a joke about my brother, I said.

I’m not trying to be callous, but don’t you think it’s past time?

Maybe.

And about what your uncle said—

Not tonight. Let it go.

Exactly, she said. Let it go.

I soon became familiar with the long train ride to Charlottesville, the halting, slowly accelerating departure, newspapers and books shielding faces, drinks in the jolly bar car. Strange intimacies with strangers, the proffered stories and the swiveled glances. The endless telephone poles and the scalloped pattern of their lines, rising and falling, rising and falling out the windows. The filthy ditches and the piles of gravel and the scrap-metal heaps. Long lengths of gleaming metal pipes stacked in pyramid form. Featureless glass office towers, low-slung factories abandoned to rot. Brick bungalows and back yard swings. The huge neon sign on the Delaware River Bridge, part boast, part lament:
TRENTON MAKES—THE WORLD TAKES
.

She must have known that my devotion to our correspondence hinted at larger devotions; yet I wondered how something so powerful could have remained dormant all this time, or if not dormant then at least hidden. She was a mysterious creature, sensuous in the way she moved, self-possessed in the extreme, yet beneath the calm exterior a fierce intelligence burned, a hunger for ideas and language. When I arrived at her apartment the first time, she insisted on reading aloud to me the last eight pages of Don DeLillo’s first novel,
Americana
, which she’d just finished. Then she ordered me to carry her to the bed. We spent the rest of the afternoon there in the warm yellow light, delicious hours of indulgent pleasure.

How sweet the taste of stolen bread.

The next day, while we made dinner, the phone rang. By the way her face changed when she answered it, I knew it was her boyfriend. He told her he’d received her letter, in which she’d flatly stated their relationship was over. He couldn’t let himself believe it. There must be someone else, he said. She did not answer. In that silence there’s a name, he said. There is someone, isn’t there?

She hung up the phone.

Later, while we were lying next to each other in the dark, she said, It scares me to say this. But I know as long as I live I’m never going to feel about anyone the way I feel about you. I’m never going to find someone who makes me feel so good about myself. I respect you. I respect your need for freedom.

That’s the beauty of this, I said. We respect the other person’s needs. I don’t think we come to this with blinders on. We can have freedom in togetherness.

Guardians of each other’s solitude, she said.

Yes. Guardians of each other’s solitude.

We appeared to agree on everything that mattered. We could have each other. We could have our work. We could have our space in which to think and create and we could do it in nearness to a lover.

I allowed myself to believe we could have it all.

At the end of her spring semester she came to New York for nine days. We went out most nights, drank martinis and smoked expensive cigarettes, ate Vietnamese food in Chinatown, walked through SoHo and the West Village, hopping from bar to bar. She tried to educate me on the poetry criticism she’d been reading, Randall Jarrell and Helen Vendler. I tried to interest her in the novels I’d been reading,
The Virgin Suicides
and
The Pure and the Impure
. We confessed our dreams of writing something great, professed our desire to support each other in the work of doing so.

You have an idealized vision of me, she said one night. I can’t possibly live up to it. I think you’ll be disappointed eventually. I’m afraid of that.

I wanted to assure her it wouldn’t happen; if anything, I’d disappoint her. Of course she wasn’t some angel. She wasn’t perfect. But all I knew of her, all I could intuit, intrigued me. Even her moodiness when hungry charmed me. Rather than be wounded by her testy tongue, I was moved to feed her. I wanted to learn the art of taking care, and anyway she mostly took care of herself, and happily. She avoided making me a perpetual human-improvement project. I did her the same courtesy. We each had our flaws—mine were impossible to hide—but we had no urge to modify them in each other. I began with an image of her and wanted only to add understanding and nuance and roll with the punches. I didn’t want her to conform to my image. I wanted her to expand and complicate it. Or so I told myself.

She did so in spades one night when I made some stray comment concerning my notebooks. They were my repository of toxic thoughts and unspeakable dreams, my testing ground for scenes and ideas, my suicide commonplace book, my sanctuary of the mind. Mention of them cast a shadow over her face. It was there suddenly, and just as suddenly it was gone, and I knew the passing shadow meant that she had read them. I said, You didn’t, did you? She twisted her face in shame and said yes. She admitted she’d gone looking for herself, gone looking for my most candid thoughts about her. It was narcissistic, she said. I wanted to know what you had written about me. It was that simple.

Only a few days earlier I had told her it would be over if she ever dared violate my private writings. I’ll throw you out on your ass, I said. That will be it.
Finito
. Done. My trust would be destroyed.

We were no longer in the realm of the hypothetical. My threat had backfired. Instead of warning her off, I’d fueled her curiosity, made her think there were things worth reading in those mad scribblings.

For everything else she was, aside from a narcissistic snoop—witty, well read, a great beauty, a kind soul, a sporting lover—I decided I should try to forgive her.

So you want to know my secrets? I said.

Is this a trap? she said.

I’ll tell you my secrets. You don’t need to go hunting for them.

I don’t know if I want to hear this.

You can handle it.

You think?

I do. Here’s one: I fear I’ll one day put a gun to my head, to know what that feels like, to bring myself closer to the one person I can’t seem to reach another way.

Um, okay.

Also, I could have saved him. That’s the big one. I had my chance. I could have saved him but I betrayed him with selfishness and inattention.

I don’t buy it.

I knew you wouldn’t. I don’t expect you to. But it’s true.

She sat for a long time in silence.

Do you really believe that? she said at last.

I’ve thought about it almost every day since he died, I said.

Here’s what I think, she said. I think what
he
did was the ultimate act of selfishness. And you’re one of the casualties. You didn’t kill him. He killed himself. But you can’t bring yourself to blame him, so you’ve got to go looking for suspects, and the most convenient one to finger is yourself.

A fury rose within me, an urge to defend him, but I couldn’t think of how, so I held my tongue.

Be clear what it is you’re mourning, she said. You’re not mourning what you had. You’re mourning what can never be. You’re mourning the loss of possibilities.

I wanted to tell her she was wrong, or maybe just glib. I wanted to tell her that the manner of the death made a difference in the manner of the mourning. I wanted to tell her that a suicide bequeathed the grieving a unique blend of emotions—anger and guilt first among them—and an intensity of regret otherwise unknown in the human experience. But I feared her superior education, her wider breadth of reference. She’d probably run circles around me, leaving me feeling lousy about how poorly I understood the central event of my life, and I didn’t need it, not that night—I was too invested in my own mythology; I’d exposed myself and been told I was wrong—so I rolled over and pretended to sleep.

We honed a routine of twice-weekly telephone talks, occasional visits to the other’s city, afternoons in bed whenever possible, followed by nights on the town. We tinkered with the definition of our situation. For a time we were having an affair. For a time we were boyfriend-girlfriend. For a time we were even something like friends with benefits, free to see other people. Depending on the week, we were either in cahoots or in love, or all of the above.

Bob Bartley and I talked so infrequently I remember every occasion with uncanny clarity. I even recorded these encounters in my journal, they were so strange and suggestive. The first time, he asked if I would proofread something he’d written. I didn’t want to proofread his work, but you don’t say no to the most important person at the world’s most important publication.

I read the column. I disagreed with everything in it, but it was powerfully written. That was the unmistakable thing about his editorials—even if you thought they were crude ideological screeds, as they almost invariably were, they left you with no doubt about what he believed. He claimed to craft everything he wrote for optimum “muzzle velocity,” as he once put it to another journalist. His style owed a great deal to the old yellow journalism of personal invective; he didn’t just savage his opponents’ ideas, he aimed to obliterate his opponents altogether, or at least ream them with a rusty poker for their intellectual bankruptcy, their moral cretinism.

I told him I saw only one mistake. He’d made the words “pipe dream” one word, with no space between them. I told him it should be two words, according to
Webster’s New World Dictionary
, which was my authoritative source in such matters.

He told me he didn’t care what
Webster’s New World Dictionary
said. It was his editorial, and he wanted pipe dream to be one word:
pipedream
. He said I should delete the space I’d inserted between pipe and dream.

I did.

We talked a second time a few months later. I was standing in the hallway with a colleague from the Leisure & Arts page, and Bob Bartley approached us. He said he had two doctors’ appointments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan the next day. He had a bit of leisure time to spare between them, and wondered if there was any art worth seeing at the museums on the Upper East Side.

I said, Yes, there’s a wonderful show of Walker Evans photos at the Met.

He said, Thanks, I may have a look at that.

A few days later I met him in the hallway. I said hello.

He did not say hello.

I said, Bob, did you see the Walker Evans show at the Met?

He stopped and looked at me. I wondered if I should have called him Mr. Bartley.

He said, Yes, I saw it.

What did you think?

It wasn’t for me, he said. I stayed for five minutes and went to the Egyptian galleries.

Walker Evans was, among other things, a great documentarian of Depression-era southern poverty; Bob Bartley was appalled by the very idea of poor people. He’d once told the
Washington Post Magazine
that he didn’t think there were any poor people left in America, “just a few hermits or something like that.” To Bob Bartley, Walker Evans’s photos were a form of pornography that depicted human beings in a sinful state of filth and depravity, and such images had no place in an American museum.

Of course I disagreed. Not only did I appreciate the unadorned honesty of Walker Evans’s photographs, I’d grown up in a poor family myself. As a child coming of age on a farm where we couldn’t make enough money to get by, I’d stood in line with my mother at the community hall in Currie, Minnesota, for handouts of surplus government cheese. Pictures of people like us from the time of the Great Depression hung in many museums, farmers too broke to feed themselves without government help.