Anything Can Happen (8 page)

I will not have established freedom and goodwill everywhere. I will not have seen to it that everyone leads a useful and productive life and exhibits only tenderness and generosity toward others—all others. I will not have unified the races, or equalized the genders, or protected and educated the children. Nothing I will have done will have resulted in a complete world reformation. In all my sixty, seventy, or eighty years—nothing. And that's what I don't like.

You think I'm kidding.

The cover of a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue shows a gorgeous blond, Ashley Montana, emerging from the sea, wearing a white bathing suit and a white straw hat. She appears to be bone dry. The caption reads:
ASHLEY MONTANA GOES ASHORE IN THE CAICOS.

We are aboard my sailing yacht, Ashley Montana and I. I, too, am named Ashley Montana, as is the boat. We are all three called Ashley Montana. Ashley and I have just made love four times in the past fifteen minutes. She is pooped. I am full of pep and vim. She stretches out on the poop deck and veils her vague blue eyes behind the lenses of her oversize Porsche sunglasses.

"Pooped?" I ask.

"Bored," she barely says.

The word terrifies me. If Ashley is bored, she is bored with
me.
I know it's true.

It was not so in the beginning, when love was young. Or as she put it, when the "relationship" was young. In those days, Ashley and I were
new
, everything was
new.
We were modern life itself! How the time flew by! We would lunch alfresco at those cramped, tiny restaurants on Madison Avenue with the little tables spilling out onto the middle of the sidewalk. We stared past each other and ordered water. How gaunt we looked! How pained!

We read celebrity magazines from cover to cover. Often it took days. Yet we knew everything one could possibly know about Ben Affleck and J. Lo and Rosie and Chris Matthews. Our heads swam with knowledge.

We took up ceramics. We bought each other stuffed animals. We gave them names! We called them both Ashley. We were invited to benefits for serious diseases. We went! How we laughed!

We threw each other surprise birthday parties, where everyone brought hilarious gifts and everyone made hilarious toasts, and weren't we both surprised! Guests came dressed as their favorite diet. Such fun guessing.

We watched
Law and Order.
We watched
Law and Order.
We watched
Law and Order.

We watched
Masterpiece Theater.
We saw another thirty-part series on the collapse of the British Empire. Britain had to give India back to India. We wept for weeks.

We were on TV ourselves. We did the news. "Back to you." She said, "Back to you." I said, "No, back to
you.
" We were journalists.

We did a lot of soul-searching. No luck so far.

We talked about our latest projects with other people. We talked about
their
projects. So many screenplays, so many movies of the week, docudramas, miniseries, so many first novels. (We had always wanted to write one.) We redid the kitchen. (We could not use the apartment for a year!) We bought land in Montana. That made Ashley happy. We renounced Ecstasy though neither of us had ever taken any. We were ecstatic. Nonetheless, we admitted ourselves to the Betty Ford Clinic. Everyone said it was a beautiful gesture. It made the columns.

We
found
ourselves. We
lost
ourselves. We
found
ourselves again. We
lost
ourselves again. Someone found ourselves
for
us and returned them, but demanded a reward. We learned how to
be
ourselves. We learned how to be
other
people. Other people learned how to be
us.
It was confusing.

We had breakthroughs and breakdowns and breakfast. We cleaned up our act. We were in a time warp. We were in a wormhole. We were in a worm warp. We were burned out. We reached critical mass. We experienced rapprochements and schadenfreude and vertigo and
Fahrvergnügen.
And déjàs vu. We had the flu. We decided to go somewhere completely different for the summer, at first, but in the end, well, when would we see our friends? We air-kissed everybody and everybody air-kissed us.

We were OK. I was OK, and she was OK. We asked each other. "You OK?" We were.

We came on to each other. We had it all together. We got on with our lives. We told each other: "Go for it!"
It!
We were there for each other.
There!
Our energy was palpable, our atmosphere electric. We refused to learn from history, and thus we were bound to repeat it.

We were state of the art. We were on the cutting edge. We had our priorities straight. We had our heads on straight. We empowered each other. We crossed the line. We parented. We weren't parents, but we parented anyway—because we were superpersons: We were bank presidents in the morning, coached Little League in the afternoon, cooked coq au vin in the evening and were on-line all night. I don't know
how
we did it.

We were caring persons. We cared for
us.

We
saw
Penn & Teller. We
shopped
at Dean & DeLuca. We
called
Jacoby & Meyers. We
knew
Crab-tree & Evelyn. Well, we knew Evelyn. We knew Sy Syms. We were educated consumers. We were his best customers.

We had wellness. We had Botox. We had liposuction. We had hipposuction. We had rhinoplasty. We had elephantiasis.

We lost thirty pounds with Ultra Slim-Fast. We got gravely ill.

We woke up and smelled the coffee. It was Starbucks, from Rio, Rio Grande. We asked each other, "Whazzup?" "Zup?" "What up?" It was
us. We
were up.

We were laid back. We were uptight. We were ripped off. We were on a roll. We were in a rut. We were boss! We were fly! We were bitchin'! We were dudes! Didn't you just love us? We got
every
joke that David Letterman made. We knew the names of
every
rock band on
Saturday Night Live.
We liked the way they
dressed.

We had brunch!

We ate shiitake mushrooms and buffalo wings and a terrine of carpaccio with a paillard of chicken.

We fought for animal rights. We opposed capital punishment. We opposed capital punishment for animals. A pussycat was electrocuted in Texas. A serial killer. Mice, mostly. We held a vigil.

We collected Judy Chicago. We collected Robert Indiana. We loved Tennessee Williams. We admired George Washington. Naturally, we were crazy about Ashley Montana. And Joe Montana. And Joe Montegna.

We were
above
the law. We were
below
the fold. We were
beyond
the pale. We were
under
a great deal of pressure. We were
around
the block. We were
over
the hill. We were
beside
ourselves. We were
beneath
contempt.

We were into yoga. We were into yogurt. We were into prepositions.

We were plugged in. We were tuned out. We networked. We faced. We interfaced. We uploaded. We downloaded. We got loaded. We were caught in the World Wide Web.

We were Eurocentric. We were Eurotrash. We faded in. We faded out. We cut to the chase. They picked up our option.

We did construction work. We did Reconstruction work. We bought weapons of mass deconstruction. We were radiant, luminous. Both radiant
and
luminous.

Our phone-answering machine left exceptionally clever messages. The phone never stopped ringing. The phone rang off the hook. We received calls from cars, from planes, from briefcases.

We had eyeglasses made in one hour.

We lost our contacts.

We lost contact. We began to bicker. We began to find each other disappointing. We began to judge each other inappropriate.

I wanted to switch to Verizon; she wanted to stay with AT&T. I said Certs was a candy mint.
She
said it was a breath mint. I said her shoes looked like a pump.
She
said they felt like a sneaker. I said: "Tastes great."
She
said, "Less filling."

We fought over the career of Ed McMahon. We argued whether Ed had been a slave to Johnny or a star in his own right.

Could we both be right? We made up. We vowed to have no more big dinner parties. We did the right thing. We had a nice day. We had a good one.

And then, suddenly, it was all gone. Gone. And now...

Lately, I have tried without success to attract Ashley's interest. She says everything is boring. I attempt to engage her in politics. Boring, she says. I show her a photograph of Attorney General John Ashcroft. I read her the latest biography of a dead U.S. President. I turn on the PBS series on the American ice cream cone. Ten parts. Lots of postcards. Boring, she says.

The world of current events, which enchants me completely, sets her to yawning. Nuances of language, which have me mesmerized, hold her not. Books, movies, the antics of public figures, all of which make me leap for joy, are nothing to Ashley. I try to bring back the old days. I sing her "Macho Man." She looks away. I sing "Kumbaya." She says she's never heard of it.

Now, on our boat, the
Ashley Montana,
I plead with her. "Don't be bored, darling," I say. "Let's find an island. A place for us. Somewhere." We had already visited ten such islands. One was on the Perillo Tours. Yet none of the islands had truly seized Ashley's fancy—an illusive thing, to be sure. Nonetheless, the idea perks her up.

"Aruba?" I suggest. She shakes her head no. "Anguilla?" I offer. She rolls her eyes skyward. "St. Barths? St. Kitts? St. Croix?" Not a nod.

Ashley says, "How about Portosan?"

I explain to her that Portosan is not an island.

"How about the Caicos?" she says.

"Never heard of them," I retort.

She sits bolt upright. "Never
heard
of them? Never heard of the
Caicos
?" She explodes in laughter so shrill it scatters the fish.

"Ashley, Ashley," she sighs woefully. "
Everybody
knows the Caicos. The Caicos are
it!
Tom Cruise goes there. Penelope Cruz is there right
now.
On a cruise. Claus von Bülow, Lizzie Grubman, Norman Mailer.
All
the best people. Look, I'm sorry. But if you've never heard of the Caicos, what's the point, I'd like to know, of us going on?"

It is the moment I have dreaded. Shamelessly I beg her to stay with me. But I can see that she's ready to jump ship. It was plain from the start: She has her world, I mine.

"Go," I tell her. "But stay dry."

"Good-bye, Ashley," she says, and jumps overboard.

For a minute or so I watch her swim toward shore, in her hat, the water beading—and immediately evaporating—on her swimsuit as she glides through the sea. Soon she is far away. I turn my yacht about and sail north. I am heartbroken, yet enlightened, and full of warm memories of our time together—while in the distance, with the sun full upon the sea, and the air as free as a dream, Ashley Montana goes ashore in the Caicos.

These instructions come in French and Japanese as well, and in other languages, but don't let that throw you. Don't let anything about the enterprise throw you. You can do it, anyone can do it, because one really doesn't live in the world when it comes down to it (and it always comes down to it). Rather, one waits for the world to live in you—as a composer waits for rapture, and then becomes the life he seeks.

But, if that sounds a bit abstract to you, a little hoity-toity, read that part of
Specimen Days
in which nurse Walt Whitman is attending the Union fallen and near-dead in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., which doubled as a hospital during the Civil War—where he notes, with barely a critical remark, that the same species capable of coming up with the most dazzling inventions made of wood and brass was just as capable of blowing off one another's limbs. The hall was filled with bright machines side by side with men on cots, massaging their new stumps.

It is the way you feel when listening to national politicians speak of our great power and our powerful greatness while in your heart, you recall that still and airless afternoon in Africa, when you held an eleven-year-old in your arms shortly after he had died of starvation. Light as a feather. His last breath went out of him like a drop from a vial.

So, how to live in the world? Wait till the end of the day, when the family of swans has sequestered itself under the drawbridge near the NO WAKE sign, and the light has stalled above the open mouth of the creek, so that the sun burns like a coal in ash, and the wind is a rumor on your face, your limbs, and you are filled with wonder and remorse. Then go treat the wounded.

Inseparable from the dark dawn, this white chair, stained brown-orange at the top of the back cushion, and the ink scratches on its arms. This yellow pad. This Bic without its top.

This silence and these words that remain silent yet push and elbow
each other out of the way like Hollywood extras vying for attention. These dreams
that go forward and back, past scoundrels and geese in great flights and the outrages of history, which, since they are dreams,
become birds, then baseballs, then blues numbers and my dad in his kitchen, singing show tunes in his slippers.

This morning, this life. One could die of happiness.

Use the casket for a planter. I never did like boxes. Instead, prop me up on a high place where I can face the water—a bay, not an ocean—so that boats may pass before my blind eyes, and the noise of children playing on a float may attack my deaf ears. Then leave me to rot. And, keep the worms away, if you can. Death ought to be different.

On the other hand, rejoice. The heat from the fire has blistered the blue paint on your door, and the ashes from the volcano are floating like chicken feathers everywhere, and the mouth of the earthquake has swallowed up the silver and the books, and as soon as the tsunami arrives, there will be nothing left—no piano, no red vase from Italy, no antique Shaker shovel, no tennis trophy—not even a photo ID to tell you who you are.