Coming into the End Zone (2 page)

Once, I wanted every book I heard about. Now, I desire very few that are sent to me. Too much is being published too quickly, too much that is shoddy, in the end of too little value.

• Change of seasons. I don't understand how this distaste developed. Once my joy was in seasonal variety, the great moment when leaves began to change, the first snow, the early shift from frozen ground to moist melting, the first day the sun colored my skin. Now, I hate the end of spring for fear of the destructive summer heat, and the end of fall because I have no liking for the cold and treacherous ice. Is it change I resist? Or evidences of the passage of time? Or the threats some seasons pose: falling, burning, freezing?

• People. When I was young I liked everyone I met. Newness obscured their faults and true selves. I was too dense to see beneath the interesting surface. Over the years, I learned. Now, I like very few people I meet, almost none, suspecting their exteriors and disliking what I surmise, perhaps wrongly, about their interiors.

• Speed. I moved fast on a flat, empty plain when I was younger, noticing little of what I was scudding through, remembering less. Now that I have grown stiff and shaky on my pins (as the expression goes), I move slowly, uphill in an arduous climb or thickly through impenetrable woods. I notice everything I pass through with such effort, remember more of the terrain. I am jealous of the effort and the time it takes, true, and resent the old speed I have lost, because my slower pace gives my age away.

My loathing for speed extends to fast cars, planes, rapid talkers, swift up and down escalators, athletes, the computer's cursor, the publisher of instant books, the producer of ‘new and improved' products seemingly days after the original was marketed.

I am surprised to see that it is easier to list what I dislike than to conjure up the things I still admire. While there is still time, I will have to work at a more positive vision.

I need new batteries for my hearing aids. They are tiny things, little curls the size of infant snails. Last year I was made to face my loss of hearing, which had clearly begun to annoy Sybil, my dear friend and housemate of many years, and others to whom I turned an almost deaf ear—indeed, ears. But the compelling force to acquire two disturbing, overmagnifying instruments was my realization that the music I heard so clearly in my head (and could remember well although I could not sing it) was not what I was actually hearing, hard as I tried to listen more intently to records and tapes, the radio and television.

When I was young I made sure I heard everything, listened in on every conversation, as though widening my sphere of sound would permit me entry into the larger world. ‘I have heard that …' was a customary start to my sentences, and ‘Have you heard that …?' another. I relied heavily on what I heard in order to fill my conversation and the page.

Losing a good part of my hearing reduced my avidity. Now, I am grateful for hearing less, being left alone with my own silences, away from the raucous world of unnecessary talk, loud machines, the shrill chatter of cicadas in our American elm tree, the unending peeps of baby sparrows who nest under the air conditioner outside the bedroom window, the terrified nightmare screams of the neighbor's child through our wall at three o'clock in the morning.

I acquired hearing aids for use in public places—speeches in large auditoriums, classes, workshops, restaurants, theaters, concerts, other such places. But I find I wear them less and less, preferring not to listen to the conclusions of most speeches, the sounds of dishes at a distant waiter's station, and the confidences exchanged at a nearby table. At some plays it is a comfortable kind of literary criticism to turn the little buttons off so I hear less of the inane dialogue being exchanged by unbelievable characters in a dull and unconvincing situation.

Today is what we used to call, in my youth, the Glorious Fourth. Sybil and I celebrate by reading on the deck in the bright sun, and then straightening up the perpetually untidy garden bed at the front of the house. City gardens are full of dog defecation, candy wrappers, greasy McDonald's sacks, tree droppings.

We pack a supper, join my daughter, who has worked earlier in the day to earn overtime at her newspaper, and walk to the Capitol grounds. Hundreds of couples and families are there before us, but we make a space for ourselves by spreading a blanket, and prepare to listen to the National Symphony play patriotic music, sounds I never do hear because the system is not properly placed to bring them to us. No matter. It is Tony Bennett singing, I am told. When it is time for Placido Domingo, snob that I am, I put in my hearing aids. But still the confusion and talk around us overcome my effort to hear the tenor.

Behind us, young picnickers who can hear as little as I begin to sing ‘God Bless America.' Delighted with the sounds of their own voices, they sing the same song again and again and again. They stand up and sway, substituting their loud, tuneless voices for the symphony and the famed tenor, feeling both justified, I suppose, and patriotic.

Then there is a fine, reverberating, garish display of fireworks, weaving upward, spiraling down, and splashing out against the navy-blue Washington sky and the white monument. As she watches wide-eyed and admiring, Sybil tells me that when she dies she wishes her ashes to be placed in one of these bright, showy explosives. Her friends and relatives are to be invited to the display and instructed to stand, their heads tilted back to watch her ashes ascend. When a thousand sparks in roseate form light up the sky, and the consequent oohs and aahs rise all over the Mall, she thinks perhaps she will hear them and feel satisfied with her death.

Tired today. My neck is sore from looking up, my spirit weary from the public displays of loving one's country, not with action but with sentimental songs and flags stuck into the grass before someone's cooler filled with beer.

This morning, working on a novella about my life in Far Rockaway before I was six, I am amazed by the unbidden arrival to my pen of a game we used to play with acorns in the ample plots of soil beneath the elms on Larch Street. Sudden as lightning I remember the street, the tree, the game. How can this be? I am no longer the child I was, born with a perfect photographic memory, who floated through school on its strength with little or no reliance on reason or thought, or the adult who was graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa without having resorted very often to the connective tissue of logic.

Did it come to me from my mother? I believe so. She was able to replay every bridge hand of the afternoon from memory at the dinner table. After fifty, my seemingly infallible gift began to fail. It took longer to retrieve what once had come instantly to mind or tongue or pen. Now, my memory is much diminished, like a hard disk that suddenly fails to deliver what has been stored there.

I operate with a floppy intelligence, such as it is. The connections I make are hard-won, sudden flashes from the past, lucky effluvia from the ripe, aging compost heap that is my mind. So I remember that street, sun-filled and broad, its curious name (as far as I know there were no larch trees in Far Rockaway), and the game my sister and I contrived out of the hulls and slippery green bodies of acorns.

I feel grateful for the arrival of small pieces of information, now that the lifelong storage system of my personal computer is often down.

Six calls today, all from writers. A friend in San Francisco, another at the Writers Workshop in Iowa, one playing hooky from morning work at Yaddo and desperate to talk, one to tell me a publisher has paid fifty thousand dollars for five chapters and a synopsis of his new novel, and two, married to each other but calling individually, each no longer able to stand the ego of the other. They are separating.

Until I was in my fifties I knew only one writer, a fellow journalist named William Kennedy who thought, like me, that someday he would be writing novels. No others. Now the only people I know seem to be writers. I argue about this with myself, wondering if it is not a bad, narcissistic state of affairs. Writing may be a vice peculiar to the outcasts of society, and writers a class of eccentric persons who cling together for support against the outside, ‘normal' world.

I wish Mr. Brown, the refrigerator man, would call to say he will install the thermostat. There are puddles of excess water on the floor, and a low, throbbing sound that issues from it. I hear very little else in the house, but I can hear the old machine's dying gasps and watery gurgles.

Late this afternoon I call Richard Lucas, who is
not
a writer, but an old friend, a successful sales manager for a publisher of scholarly books in California. Last year he went on a glorious trip to China for his company. He loved the country and the people but returned with some sort of Oriental bug, he said, that he could not shake. Two months later, the strange virus was still in possession of him because his immune system had gone awry, and he knew, he told me, why he was still so sick. No one else knew. I was not to say.

This spring I saw him at a university press meeting in Cambridge, and his handsome face and body were changed into an old man's visage and frame. He was unstable on his feet, he suffered from a variety of what he called, with a smile, ‘opportunistic' afflictions. He was cheerful, and hopeful, and very clearly sick.

Now, on the telephone, he tells me he spends his spare time listening to all of the
Ring des Nibelungen
on CDs. He wonders if it is time for him to stop work. Is there a chance I might come to the West Coast for a visit? I say I will try, having no great hopes but eager to see him again, as well as other young friends who have settled in San Francisco. All of them have an apostolic approach to that beautiful place. Everyone, they think, should come out and live there, and look out at the Bay from the hills and wander Golden Gate Park and eat every kind of foreign food in the Castro section.

It is too late, I believe, for me to live in a new place, although it is not entirely new to me. Once, during the war years, I lived there, on Van Ness Avenue as I recall, and later across the Bay in Oakland when you could still take a cool, foggy ferryboat ride to that city-suburb.… I tell Richard to come here to Washington when he is in the East (his company has an office in New York City, like most publishers who went west), but it is a foolish thing to say, to make him believe he will be able to visit me. He says he will try.

After he hangs up, I realize I say this more and more. Not ‘I will see you there' but ‘Come here to see me.' Age. Loss of the enjoyment of leaving home. I should add that to my list of dislikes I made the other day:

• Travel.

A legal-minded adviser on the radio tells a questioner: ‘Get it in writing.' Meaning, I suppose, don't trust the oral agreement or the hearty handshake. Get it in writing. I recognize it is the unspoken command that hovers over the head of every writer every morning, every hour of every day. Stop talking about it, planning to do it, considering the alternatives. Get it in writing.

Growing old means abandoning the established rituals of one's life, not hardening into them as some people think. There are the occasional reunions with people from the past, ‘old' friends. Leftovers from places where one once lived, neighbors, office mates from the places one worked or taught. Christmas cards are ritual cords that bind us (‘my children are now all out of the nest,' they write on the blank side of the card, ‘as yours must be') or the call out of the blue, like the one this afternoon. ‘Remember me from St. Joseph's parish in Des Moines? We met at the rectory.'

Thirty-five years ago. My perfect memory fails me. I do not remember, neither the name nor the face nor the occasion. We have not maintained the ritual of greeting cards, and so I have entirely forgotten this man. There were no artificial reasons for getting together, like reunions. But now he is in Washington, and eager to remind me of what I have forgotten.

Should I ask him to dinner, as he seems to hope? No, the rituals have given way. I beg off, being overly committed, or leaving town, or something. I don't remember what I said. I'm sorry. Are your children out of the nest? Of course. It's been a long time. I'm sorry. Goodbye.

I cannot remember his name after I hang up. So it goes.

It is the hottest summer in this city's history. This morning, on the deck where I drink coffee and read the newspaper while looking out at the dry elm and the roofs already wet with humidity, it is already eighty-five degrees at six. I think with longing of the sea, where I was in early June, on the bay end of Delaware, close to the ocean but not yet at it. On that coast there is curiously odorless ocean, unlike the heavily weighted-with-salt smells, the fishy, spicy odors, of Maine.

I chose to spend two weeks there because my sense of being alive depends on periodic exposure to the sea. I need to swim and float in it. I need to sit at its edge and watch its moody, heavy, unpredictable vastness. I must stroll its wrack to find treasures of stone, shell, bits of glass and wood, even, occasionally, a piece of ‘sea' porcelain which I fantasize as breakfast crockery from a shipwrecked schooner. The ocean restores to me an acceptance of the way the world is now, consoles me for my losses of faith, optimism, physical pleasure, great expectations, mother, sister, grandmother, and young, plague-ridden friends.

Sunk down into the intense heat and humidity of this July morning, I manage to ‘cool off' by thinking of the dunes at Lewes where I sat, shielded against the wind, on a deserted beach. I watched the Cape May ferry make its haughty, aristocratic way across the water, a white wedding cake of a ship on an empty ocean, looking as out of place as a skyscraper would at the beach. My memory restores the ship, the cool sand, the grey eternal sea. Perspiration and mortality sit less heavily upon me.

A remnant of cool air from the night clings to the deck. I finish my coffee and take up my battered clipboard, a piece of equipment as necessary to me as radar to a flight traffic officer. I bought this board in 1960. It has held in its rusty iron jaws at the top of a spotted brown length of board every piece of white lined paper on which I have written to this time. The corners of the pressed board have rounded with use and are now flaking away. In ink, with small script, I have written the names of nine books composed on its surface, their dates, and the places to which the board traveled with me.