Coming into the End Zone (21 page)

Sighing, I set off to find the captain's quarters. As I had been instructed, I put on my shining new officer's hat and white gloves and knocked once on the captain's door.

‘Enter,' he said.

Standing as erect as I could, I approached his desk and put my papers down in the in-box as I had been told to do. I saluted and said:

‘Ensign Grumbach reporting for duty, sir.'

The captain stood up, put on his hat with its assemblage of gold braid on the visor, and said:

‘Welcome aboard, ensign.'

And I, as instructed, replied:

‘Glad to be aboard, sir.'

This was to be a year of absurd naval etiquette. The captain was not to be denied his right to command a ship even on New Montgomery Street. Before every shift we served we rode the elevator to the sixth floor, took two steps out of the cage, turned slightly toward the large American flag mounted on a platform down the hall, and saluted the poop deck at the stern of the ship. If the officer of the deck was anywhere around, we were required to ask permission to come aboard, sir.

If a goodly number of naval personnel were aboard the elevator, it would take a little time to complete this operation before the elevator, carrying irritated civilians on their way to their jobs on the upper floors, could be emptied. But respect to the poop deck was not to be denied our captain.

Regularly, we had white-glove inspections, to see that our desks and cubicles were shipshape. Sometimes the captain, in full uniform, held an unannounced tour of inspection. He ran his finger over the tops of our Royal typewriters to assure himself they were not gathering dust. On occasion, bells would ring throughout the floor, and we would line up before the elevator doors. This was termed, seriously, ‘abandon ship drill.' We would ride down to the lobby and stand around in congenial little groups to await the call to come aboard again. So it went.

I remember that, near the end of my time there, the captain seemed to feel that the rules of the Navy were not reaching far enough. The order went out that the block on which the building stood, and the street across from it, were now constituted decks of the ship. On those streets enlisted men were to salute officers, and officers were to return the salute. Now you must know that in those years, San Francisco was a Navy town, with naval personnel of every rank and rate cramming its streets. To salute every officer one passed, especially
women
officers, was an absurdity to the hundreds of enlisted men and women on our street. So they would step down into the gutter and walk along the edge of the traffic to avoid saluting on the sidewalk. They were on the water, they claimed, and gutter travel came to be known as the Jesus walk.

On second thought, I removed the little book on naval ordnance from the packing carton and put it into one marked ‘Giveaway.'

For review, the letters of Stephen Crane arrived today. Last week I browsed through a volume of Henry James's letters to Edmund Gosse. Crane's letters are very fragmentary, very few of them of any real consequence. James's to Gosse are extremely short, and many of them dwell on appointments they had with each other, or their illnesses.

In the great rush to publish every word put down by respected writers of the past and the present, too often we are given books of largely worthless letters, collections of stray papers that should have been destroyed by the author, journals not intended to reach any reader's eyes. Juvenilia better left to the trash sometimes is published as an ‘important' volume of ‘discoveries' or ‘significant' work of an earlier period.

But I started to talk about the letters of Crane and James/Gosse. I am comforted to see that occasionally these letters resemble my own in quality, significance, content. So often I write to a friend, then read over the empty prose and wish I had striven for more elegant, memorable expression. Now I feel relieved that I have precedents for my ordinariness and quotidian subject matter. I can only hope no recipient is saving them with the intention of committing them to print.

Two items from a 1977 notebook in the pile awaiting pickup by the librarian of the University of Virginia:

• Piece of a Louise Bogan poem called ‘Women':

Women have no wilderness in them,

They are provident instead,

Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts

To eat dusty bread.

‘No wilderness in them.' Reminiscent of Joyce's admonition to the young would-be novelist who, Joyce thought, did not have enough chaos in him to be a writer.

• Visiting a friend, Edward Kessler, on Clark's Island off the coast of Duxbury in Massachusetts. Ed tells me about the island's oldest inhabitant. Every year on her birthday, now well into her nineties, very arthritic, and walking with two canes, she climbs painfully into her boat and rows twice around the island.

Out of the same notebook falls an almost transparent piece of paper which, at first, I cannot identify. I spread out the three square sheets, which are connected to each other by perforations, and read at the bottom of each in pale-blue ink:
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
. Then I remember. The paper comes from rolls serving the toilets in the bathroom of the British Museum. I remember being delighted to find, when I was working on the Mary McCarthy biography years ago in the lovely reading room of that library, that every sheet of toilet paper in public buildings was similarly inscribed.

Sybil and I continue to disagree about what should go to Maine, what should remain in Washington in the apartment we have taken on the Hill to afford us a retreat in the cold months in Maine, and what should be sent to storage. I want everything I value to go to the new house, she wants much of what she cares about to stay here in the apartment. We are divided by what we most cherish and where we most wish to be. It may work out: I may lose my preference for the isolated life by the sea and want to return to the city, she may wear out her long-held ties to crowds, theaters, and her bustling bookshop, and settle for the quiet life beside the cove. If we are still at odds, we will have to find a middle ground on which to combine our passions.

Her requirements always seem unimportant to me, and mine, I'm sure, to her. I worry that she will perceive how selfish my motives are for where I wish to be. I remember Ford Madox Ford writing in
The Good Soldier:
‘For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses.'

Sybil and I go to Rudy von Abele's apartment to see his books. We are alone among his possessions: some pictures, bookcases, a few pieces of furniture, compact disks, records, and a large collection of books. The dust that lies over everything suggests the particles of his person, as well as the manner of his bachelor existence. This was a man who loved and taught the great modern Irish writers. We look eagerly at the volumes of early Joyce and Beckett and find first editions among them. But they turn out to be working copies of the books, full of heavy marginal notes and incomprehensible numbers, much of his notation in ink. An interesting scholar's library, but unfortunately not many volumes salable as pristine first editions.

I am intrigued by the 125 compact disks of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and a few moderns like Stravinsky. When Sybil makes an offer for most of Rudy's books—first editions or not, they are interesting, useful books for a general bookstore—I ask the executor if I could buy the disks. Now, ready to hand, in one swoop, I have another collection of music which, in its technology, supersedes all my old records and newer cassettes. I suppose the day will come when all recorded music will be reduced to tiny thimbles of superb quality, and these extraordinary disks will be outmoded. Now our old record player stands idle, the cassette player will be used only occasionally, and the new compact disk player, which Sybil bought as her share of the disk expense, will serve us. All this change in less than thirty years, after generations of the beloved Victrola, for which I remember sharpening reed needles. My big, black, shining, breakable 78s, badly scratched and inaccurate, are now collectors' items, beloved to me as old furniture and ancestral tintypes, but not very valuable for listening pleasure.

Sybil is away for the end of the week, doing a book fair. I am here alone in this almost-packed-up house, enjoying the solitude. Packing a volume of Susan Sontag, I impede my progress, as usual, by stopping to read. She quotes Cesare Pavese on love: ‘What one takes to be an attachment to another person, is unmasked as one more dance of the solitary ego.' So it is, I think, true at least in part. In modern cliché, the buck stops at the egocentric self, even when it appears to be love of the other.

Sybil comes home; I am glad to have my solitude ended. We go to see an exhibit of David Smith sculpture. Next to me, two matronly ladies discuss a black, linear, wrought-iron horse and buggy.

One: ‘Now, what do you think about that?'

Long pause. Then, the other: ‘Well, a lot of work must have gone into it.'

Sign in front of a Presbyterian church on Capitol Hill:
CHURCH
-
GOING FAMILIES ARE HAPPIER
. How can the pastor know? Would it were always so.

I buy a loaf of rye bread from the bakery in the Eastern Market. I cut a piece and find the bread is stale. I remember Harry Grumbach, my father-in-law, telling me that in
real
Jewish bakeries, the lady who sells the bread digs her long fingernail into the crust to prove its freshness.

March

Key West: I speak at a seminar on the short story, with John Edgar Wideman and Jane Smiley. We are put up in an opulent hotel that looks out on the Gulf. My suite has a sauna, two enormous rooms, a fully equipped kitchen, and sweeping balconies. For what I have to say on the subject, the housing seems excessive. The first morning, after breakfast, I take a walk to the pool area (there does not seem to be a beach) and come upon two very old, fat women who are identical twins. They walk arm in arm, matching their tiny steps, their sausage arms embracing each other behind their backs. Both wear bright new Nike sneakers, powder-blue raincoats tightly belted about their middles (they have no waists), the same top button undone under each flabby throat, and light polyester slacks stretched over their heavy legs. They appear to be outlandish caricatures, female Tweedledee and Tweedledum, almost obscene human figures. I wonder: Why do they dress alike? Because all their lives they have? Because they like the attention identical twins receive? Because they love themselves in each other, even in their present weighty state?

I take a small motorboat out to a reef to snorkel, on the advice of a Key Westerner at the conference. The boat is very old and shakes curiously. I distract myself from what appears to me to be the threat of the boat's flying apart at any moment by trying to remember the word I learned recently (the British use it frequently) for vibrating violently: to judder. By the time my personal computer has retrieved the word, the boat arrives, still juddering, at the reef. The reef is disappointing, lacking both fish and interesting coral.

There is no escape from the terrible realities of this decade, even down here in this land of somehow artificial sunshine, green-water pools, and warmth that feels like steam heat. A memorial service is held for an old friend, Jim Boatwright, a winter resident of Key West and editor of the noted quarterly
Shenandoah
. Those of us at the conference who knew him leave the official doings and go to a small house on a side street. There, in his garden, poets and novelists, editors and friends listen to writers—Peter Taylor, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill—read from the poetry that Boatwright loved. I remember his bright, handsome, lively, sunburned face because later, when we go through his house and into the garden on the other side for wine and cheese, we are offered a keepsake, a recent picture of him. He is still smiling in this last photograph, but his face is sunken, his eyes deeply ringed. He has been ravaged by the unforgivable scourge, AIDS.

I weep through the whole reading, for Jim, and Bill, and Robert, and Michael, and Tom Victor, and Richard, and thousands of others who have gone with them.

Henry Miller: ‘For the person who feels, life's a tragedy. For the person who thinks, it's a comedy.' Clearly I have never thought enough.

The service, or perhaps the food or water in the lavish hotel, have upset my stomach. On my way on foot to see the Ernest Hemingway House, I go into a restaurant with an outside café to ask to use the bathroom. The hostess seems reluctant, explaining that too many people come in for just that purpose. I must have looked desperate, because she finally agrees, and says:

‘Don't mind the sink.'

The sink is not the object of my interest. But when I finish with the toilet, I turn to it to wash. Coiled in the bowl is a realistic green plastic snake, intended, I suppose, to discourage further use of the facility, a new variety of Southern hospitality.

I sit on the balcony and watch the sun go down over the Gulf. Crowds are lined up on the wharf. As the last cusp of sun disappears into the now-yellow sea, everyone down there bursts into applause. Later I learn this is a local custom. People come to the edge of the water on sunny evenings to clap for the sunset.

Seated there as the light dies, I think of an idea for a story. A woman (professional of some sort) is about to be married for the second time, entirely certain that this approaching alliance with a cultivated, sophisticated, mature man will avoid all the mad excitement, violent sexual encounters, and, ultimately, severe disappointments of her first marriage. They decide to spend the two weeks before the ceremony apart, he visiting his elderly parents, she in Yucatán. In Mérida she meets a young, handsome Mayan named Luis (?) who carries her baggage from her rented car to the hotel. He suggests he come back to her room that evening. Surprising herself, she agrees. Their lovemaking is passionate, even violent, unbelievably enjoyable. She realizes Luis is very much like her first husband. Will she marry again?