Coming into the End Zone (16 page)

I get only so far, and then find it hard to go further with the skeleton, to stretch on a Procrustean bed a tissue of words. Sometimes I am stopped by an outline that is too complete. I think it would be better, safer, to dive into the beginning of a story, not knowing where I am going, and let it bloom, blossom, proceed by budding.

I remember an opening sentence: ‘He lived alone with a daughter who had died and a wife who had left him.' A startling opening, but so complete in itself that one would be unable to go a step beyond it.

Other times I have been blocked by plain lack of experience, a condition not easy to believe of a woman past seventy. But still, never once in those years have I been homeless, not one night in more than twenty-five thousand nights. I have never been hungry nor missed a single meal, except by choice. Never dirty for more than a few hours. Very rarely very sick: I have lost no limbs, no interior organs, not even appendix or tonsils or adenoids. I have never been abused or rejected or (as far as I know) mentally ill. I went to war, was in the U.S. Navy but was never allowed aboard a ship. All these avenues of experience, and a thousand others, were cut off for me. I feel the absence, even though I think I remember reading that Henry James was able to write a story about Huguenots after glimpsing a family of them seated around a table as he was going down the stairs past their apartment. But my compost heap lacks some essential nutrients. How can I write? I ask myself, put my pen into the metal tip of the clipboard, rest my head on the back of my chair, and settle for a suntan on the warm, unproductive deck. I know why I prefer writing out of doors. If nothing comes, if I am unable to write a word, there is still some gain: the sun on my skin, which, despite every medical warning, I still love and indulge.

Recently, waiting in line for a book sale to open, I heard about the exercise program of a fellow buyer. She told me she and her friends drove regularly to a vast shopping mall in Virginia in the early morning before the shops within it open. They stride rapidly through the enclosed corridors. From one end to the other and back: a little less than a mile. If they are feeling energetic they walk the route twice.

I am aghast. In late November, to do some early-Christmas scouting for gifts, Sybil and I arrived at Tysons Corner a few minutes before ten. I tried to imagine taking daily exercise in those sterile halls, between walls of glass, stainless steel, and black protective gates, denied every natural odor of mossed tree trunks and pine cones or breezes from the sea, salt, fishy smells, wet dunes. I tried to breathe deeply only to inhale captive, stale whiffs of cigarette smoke, pizza and popcorn, sneakers and sweat suits, yesterday's coffee and french fries. The air is motionless, an artificial compound of synthetic odors. For me, a mall represents the essence of the eighties, a plastic chamber of horrors, reminiscent of the feeling in Sartre's play
No Exit
, devised for persons growing old in cities, shielded, for the moment, from polluted air, water, the failures of the ozone layer, and the damaging rays of the sun, and from the fresh morning of the spirit.

The Library of Congress Reading Room, where I go on occasion to use its reference section, harbors some wonderful characters, so intriguing that often I am distracted from my work to watch them. There is a lady who calls herself the Bride of Christ. She dresses in white, surrounds her head with a thick white veil, and carries a wooden cross whenever she gets up from her seat to change her book. Passing behind her on the way to the card catalogue, I try to see what she is reading. I cannot tell; the book is upside down. Another middle-aged lady never takes her feet from the floor when she walks. She is called ‘the glider' by the librarians. One can identify her passage without looking up by the long, swishing sounds as she moves about the room. I lunch with the librarian in charge of the reading room. Tori Hill is small, charming, tolerant, witty. She volunteers, an evening a month, to do the accounting work for Wayward Books. She tells me of a recent trouble. Yesterday a street person who spends the winter months in the reading room was found to be slamming his book on the lice he had picked from his hair. A number of such dead insects were then discovered in books he had used. She asked him to be de-loused before he returned. He was unwilling to leave. She was gently insistent. A guard guided him to the outside door.

Dan Harvey, my old friend who is a distinguished publicist, calls to tell me that Richard died yesterday at home in San Rafael, California. I had spoken to him the day before. He was unable to answer me when his friend Zach put the phone to his ear. When I said I loved him and was thinking of him, I heard a low sound, like air forced from his throat and nothing else, but I believe he heard and understood me. I pray he did.

I have a vision of his gaunt face and white hair across the atrium of the Fogg Museum last year, where we met for the university presses' annual convention. A band is playing. Young, vigorous, smartly dressed press people are drinking champagne, eating shrimp, talking loudly, brightly, to each other. He is at the edge of the festivities, leaning against the wall, looking weary, but smiling to everyone who stops to speak to him.

We hug, kiss. I try not to feel the unfleshed boniness of his back, his shoulders, his thin arms under his elegant silk suit. Richard, my beloved friend, is now reduced to a little more than half the size of what he was. He asks me if I think he has changed. I love this man and yet I can do nothing, not the smallest thing, to help him or save him from this accursed plague except silently plead with him:

‘Don't die.'

Out loud I answer his question: ‘Only that you are thinner.'

Now he is gone, having entered what Freud called, in another context, ‘the splendid isolation' of death. When I called him last month to thank him for my beautiful ash cane, he told me he had bought tickets for the Met's new production of the Ring. ‘When is it?' I asked. ‘Next April. Two tickets. Zach will come with me.' This was after his legs no longer served him. I marveled at his optimism. Wimbledon and opera are his two passions. I prayed he would make it to the Ring as he had to the tennis matches. But no. His own
Götterdämmerung
arrived first.

On the same day, I read the obituary of the Reverend James Sandmire, who died in San Francisco at the age of fifty-nine, of AIDS. He left ‘a longtime companion,' a daughter in Dallas, a son in Salt Lake City, a father and two sisters in Oklahoma, another in Utah. He was a Harvard graduate, an elder of the Universal Fellowship, and a founder of the Metropolitan Community Churches in San Francisco, ‘which welcomed homosexuals.' He tried to affiliate his church with the National Council of Churches, telling them that ‘the reason people come to our church is because they can't come to yours.' The National Council of Churches rejected his application.

Christmas. Two days before, we left at six in the morning, and then waited almost two hours to leave the ground; the airport was crowded with planes in line before us. The plane to Portland came into fog, turned back to New Hampshire, landed, heard a new weather report, took off again, finally found a hole in the heavy bank of viscous cloud, and went down to land. We rented a car and made the four-hour drive north through heavy rain and, at the end, thick darkness that made it hard to find the road to East Blue Hill. It took us almost a day to come from Washington to central Maine.

But then we were at Bob and Ted's house in the woods. A huge fire burned in the oversized fireplace, dinner was almost ready, and Peggy, our hostess last summer for my dreaded seventieth birthday, came from her family dinner to have another dinner with us. We admired the tree that ‘the boys,' as I foolishly call them (they are fifty-eight and forty-eight), decorated with moss, lichen, pine cones, and birch bark, and heard about their friend Bill, the real estate agent who wants to show us some houses in the area.

Next morning, firm in our resolve to look but not buy—after all, it is far too early for such a change; Sybil has at least two years before she can retire from the Library of Congress, and the lease on the bookstore is for another year—we set off in two cars to look at property. It was a crisp, cold day, ice on the paths. I walked holding Bob's arm. But the roads were amazingly clear, the air was bright, and sun shone on the black, bare limbs of trees. No one is about. The town's streets, stores (those few that remain open in the winter), and fields were all deserted. Our little caravan was the only occupant of the roads.

We looked at a number of places, large Maine houses with attached barns, a house high on a rise that looked out on the road before the bay, another buried in woods, one with ‘a partial view,' which turned out to mean, in real estate parlance, that one could see the water in winter if one climbed to the second floor and squinted out of one window. Sybil is interested in proximity to a good road, in order to relocate Wayward Books someday; I want a generous view of the water, and complete privacy. Neither of us thought about immediate purchase and relocation. But we trudged from place to place, voicing our objections, almost glad that nothing suitable presented itself.

At one house, a former bed-and-breakfast, we met another agent who listened patiently to our dislikes and needs and then told Bill that he knew a place in Sargentville, down the road a bit, that we might like. Bill had not seen this place but still would take us there. Now we were a procession of three cars. Sybil rode with George, the new agent, Bob and Ted followed, Bill and I came behind.

We had just pulled into the driveway of the house and stopped when I saw Sybil coming around from the front. Her face was flushed and she seemed to be breathing hard. I rolled down the window. She put her head into the car and said:

‘I think we are in serious trouble.'

I got out and followed her. A little way around the stark, simple, undecorated house, we came upon a magnificent view, a cove at low tide. Beyond it was a strip of blue water, a deep-water mooring marked off by a crocodile-shaped strip of black rocks, and then two grey buildings far down the opposite shore. The grey hills of Deer Isle were in the distance. The view was constructed like a theatrical set, with diminishing coulisses extending to the rear. Over it all, winter-gaunt gulls rose and descended. The trees—an oak at one side of the cove, two spruces at the other—were barren or browned, the ground at our feet crisp and grey, like frozen shredded wheat, the uncut meadow beyond a low jungle of vines and what appeared to us to be weeds.

We were indeed lost. Without ever having set foot in the house, we knew instantly we wanted to live on this cove, in sight of all that varied, layered beauty and blue winter water. We went through the house, a place that had an adequate but not excessive number of rooms. One, a former summer kitchen, might be converted to a decent-sized study. Painting was needed everywhere, one chimney was broken down, another unlined, the roof needed work. We might add a deck from which to view the cove by day, the big sky by night, and a screened porch to avoid the annual April, May, and June mosquitoes and black flies, a somewhat different kitchen and bathroom, perhaps. But what was all that in the light of the glorious cove?

We went to lunch with Bill and, to our amazement, talked about a contract. The next day we signed one, containing an offer to be submitted to the owners, closed our eyes, and breathed deeply (Sybil admitted she felt sick to her stomach from the moment she put her name on the paper), overwhelmed by what we had done so precipitately. We owned a house in Washington we had to sell before we could buy this one, Sybil had years to go before her planned retirement from the Library of Congress. I was horrified by the prospect of moving five thousand books and the contents of the North Carolina Avenue house (the overloaded result of the consolidation of our two households years ago) to Maine. By
May
. The closing on the sale was set for late April.

How could we make sense, order, and progress out of all this? We flew home in a state of shock, bewildered by what we had done. A chaotic future stretched out before us, a jumble of real estate dealings, cliff-hanging financial arrangements, and, once again (five years after we had vowed we would never move again, never go through those terrible months of upheaval, restoration, and dislocation), all the slings and arrows of settling into a new, strange place, fixing another house, learning the vagaries of a capricious and, we had heard, most difficult and lengthy winter, and acquiring, at our unlikely ages, new acquaintances and friends.

A year ago I wrote in this memoir: ‘It is too late now to live in a new place.' Now I think: How dare I plan to live a life in Maine in the dwindling time that remains ahead for me? The joke is that people are now mentioning such absurd things to us as a thirty-year mortgage. I remember when Jack Leggett, in the summer of 1982, asked if I would like to come to the Iowa Writers Workshop for a semester. I said, ‘When?' He said, ‘Oh maybe, the spring of '84.'

I thought: How dare I think so far ahead, at my vulnerable age? But now it seemed the older one grew, the less realistic one was about the future. Even with all the dire anatomical warnings that arrive on occasion, optimism rules one's decisions. History serves my hopes. Once before, when I was fifty-four, I left the life I had led for more than thirty years, my marriage, my longtime tenured teaching job, everyone I knew, the city I had lived in or near for more than twenty years, and went off, like the youngest son in fairy tales, to seek my fortune, and another, different life.

But then I was younger or, I think now, young. Now I am old, having despairingly celebrated my seventieth birthday last summer. This should be the age of settled decorum, stability, even sedentary acceptance of what one has or is left with. How is it possible to change everything again? Will it work?

Less than two weeks after our house is opened to the public (a violation hard to bear, but there is no other way to sell it but to ‘show' it) there is a sale contract on it. The reality of what we have done bears down upon us. If we sell it at the price we have agreed to, there will be no mortgage on the Maine house. At this point I remember Sybil's utterance when first she saw the cove. Now she decides, when the time comes to live in it, that we should name the house Serious Trouble.