Love Me (18 page)

 

 

 

Dear Turkey Lurkey, Hand signals leave so much room for misunderstanding, but we must go on what we know, and you should consider yourself lucky. Her feelings for you are in transition. You won’t be happy in Rawalpindi, so put that out of your mind right now. Of course you miss her. But loneliness is a manageable problem. And instructive: your soul is chastened, shriven, uplifted by loneliness, you become kinder and more loving. Loneliness is only hunger: stave it off with crackers and baloney sandwiches and wait for dinner to arrive. If you have friends, you’ll find romance; romance is only a juiced-up version of friendship. So quit moping. Get out of the house. Go wherever there are big crowds—the Boat Show, a Billy Graham crusade, a protest march, a Dixie Chicks concert—and mingle. Let your elbows brush other elbows. Inhale other people’s exhalations. Get out of your gloomy introspection and back into the World We Live In. Someday you’ll look back on Miss Lentils as a bump in the road you had to drive in order to get to the arms of Miss Peach, who loves and understands you and is fun to be with and shares your fondness for roast pork and football and marksmanship and turkey calling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He attached a photo of himself in camo clothes, a slight potbelly, aviator glasses, poofy blond hair. And an audio file of his turkey calls (MALE CHALLENGE, FEMALE COURTSHIP, MATING-URGENT, TERRITORIAL), which sounded like pure male panic, a man with a pair of waxen wings about to leap from a cliff.

 

 

 

Dear Turkey Lurkey, You and Wordsworth and Keats and me and everyone else, we all mourn our lost youth and brood over the odd course that life took. You’re beating your wings against the window, sir. This can eat up time and it makes you poor company, especially if alcohol is involved.

Avoid solitary tippling. Limit booze to when you’re in the company of others who are drinking the same stuff you are and in similar amounts. Keep pace with them so you see in them what is happening to yourself and when they get stupid, you know that you are, too.

Every life has its parameters. Take mine, for example. I’m an aging white male of moderate intelligence and prickly personality and what’s to be done about that? Not much. Get a good lawyer. Be glad you’re not up for bank robbery. Plead guilty to drunkenness and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Don’t fight the neighbor. Deal with things one day at a time. Above all, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear TL, First impressions are everything, and gobbling and shrieking should not be the first thing a woman sees in you. Let her see the more cultivated side of you first. Save the gobbling for farther down the road and invite her to a hunting show so she can see the standing ovation, too.

I told Mr. Shawn about Mr. Blue one evening aboard the
Shawnee
as we sailed under the Verrazano, me at the wheel and him at the cocktail shaker. It was one of those golden October days when New York is enchanted, electric, and a guy is almost able to forget that he can’t write worth shit.

I said, “Something wonderful has come along for me and I want to share the news with you,” but he was more interested in a flock of cormorants swooping over our bow. He tossed them a handful of croutons, which of course attracted a vast herd of birds and for some reason he had invited a camera crew aboard from PBS—“They’re doing a documentary on
The New Yorker,”
said Mr. Shawn, as if this explained everything. I tried to be a good sport, but it was a pain in the ass. I was busy being the helmsman and Earl the TV director was telling me to talk about the ocean as a metaphor of freedom. I told him I don’t do metaphors for free.

“How do you feel about New York as a symbol of the American promise, then?” he said. “The lady with the lamp and all.”

“It’s a good harbor,” I said. “Better than Boston‘s, that’s for sure. But Baltimore has a good harbor, too. And Norfolk. You want to talk harbors, talk about Norfolk. Hampton Roads. Maybe they should’ve stuck the Statue of Liberty there. You got the U.S. Navy in Norfolk, speaking of women and liberty.”

“Say more.”

“Don’t have more to say.”

The cameraman was right in my face with his lens, and I was trying to keep my eye on a garbage scow that was swinging across our bow to starboard.

“Talk about liberty and your feelings about it and New York in terms of your own writing or your memories of France.”

Earl was one of those young guys who shave their heads to give themselves a hip menacing look, but the truth is, they have the brains of a beach ball. Like every other TV producer in the world, Earl was clueless about the real world, he had no sensibility, so he had to shoot thousands of miles of film because things only made sense to him when he saw them on a screen.

“You have a blankness about you that in my opinion would spell success as a TV host,” Earl remarked, looking down at his video monitor. I told him to blow it out his ass. I said to Mr. Shawn, “Do we have to stand here and let this moron take pictures of us?”

Mr. Shawn is sitting on a coil of rope, in a black shirt, barefoot, mirror shades, a .22 across his lap, a brimming martini glass on his knee, studying the 14,000 terns and gulls and cormorants whom a handful of croutons can attract to a boat. He says, “What are you afraid of, Wyler?” Right away, the camera zooms in on my look of surprise.

“I object to being enlisted as an extra in somebody’s stupid video,” I say, knowing my words will be edited out.

“Afraid you might look foolish, Wyler?”

I am shocked at this, coming from a man whom I love and admire.

Earl and his cameramen are tense with anticipation.

“That detached ironic tone, Mr. Wyler. The perpetual precocious adolescent flitting about, mothlike, creating trifles, feuilletons, elegant piffle. That’s the root cause of writer’s block! The source of all true art is simplicity! Stripping away! Making plain! Removing the ornamentation of the literary social climber. Getting a grip.” And he slaps me on the back. Hard. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he says. To me! He says this to me, on camera! “If you don’t have the goods, then give up the game. Don’t hang your head. It’s no shame to fail. Just do it and get it over with. Don’t base your whole life on it.”

I’m trying to steer the damn boat through an obstacle course of freighters pulling up anchor and ridiculous powerboats buzzing around and the Staten Island ferry plowing across our bow, so I’ve got plenty on my mind, thank you—But a videocam doesn’t get the big picture, and what the folks at home will see is a worried guy (me) being told to Be Myself.

And then Mr. Shawn heaves another handful of croutons and five hundred large birds swoop down toward me and I flinch and duck and the camera gets a close-up of that. The
Shawnee
is streaked with bird feathers and bird shit and careening in the wake of the Staten Island ferry and Mr. Shawn looks up at the World Trade Center, all golden in the twilight, and raises his arms as if signaling a touchdown, and he cries, “It’s not that complicated, Wyler!

“We walk around the house. We feed the dog. We sit in our father’s chair. Life is remarkable for its kindness. But the seeds of kindness do not give us words. To the contrary. Writing is a passage through narrow straits and there is always bumping into rocks. So much important writing begins with bad dreams. What we call a bad dream is simply one that intends to teach us something—” and he throws more croutons in the air and another flotilla of gulls comes in low.

The TV guys are going nuts. One cameraman is lying on the deck, shooting Mr. Shawn through a flurry of white wings, and the other guy is climbing the rigging for a high angle, and the director is practically peeing in his shorts.

“Either one accepts this or one doesn‘t, and if you do, it’s a clear gamble and of course you feel a profound sense of loss—of mysteries conspiring against you—and then you see it, Wyler!”

He climbs a few rungs up the mainmast and points toward Brooklyn.

“There is no poverty! There is no loss!”

Earl is trying to get his attention. The microphone has come un-clipped from Mr. Shawn’s collar.

“There is no reason for longing!”

“Can we do this again, with sound?” says Earl.

“Life has given gifts to the immortals and naturally you long to be one of them and you covet their gifts. But life has given you gifts, too. And the chief one is receptiveness.”

“I’d like to shoot this again from the part about bad dreams,” says Earl, reaching for the microphone which is tangled around Mr. Shawn’s left ankle.

“Receptiveness! The little raindrop splashing on your hair—you feel it! The sweetness of gesture and manners! The rhythm of daili ness, you feel, and the lyrical energy of sex! Like a river current! A Mississippi of sex! Even a Housatonic isn’t bad!”

Earl gets hold of the microphone and tugs it. “We need to go back to the bad dreams,” he says. And Mr. Shawn looks down at the blank bald head of Earl and says, “Everyone makes his own hell, doesn’t he.” And he grabs the .22 and aims it at Earl’s feet. “If you don’t listen, I will have to find another language,” he says, and fires at the deck, and Earl is over the rail and in the water, holding on to the microphone cable for dear life, planing over the waves.

“Why steal water when it’s raining?” says Mr. Shawn. “This is basic to life. We live by a basic pigeon sense—a boy throws a rock and the pigeons rise in the air—and the impulse to write is the urge to fly on one’s own. So fly. Raise your sail and let the wind fill it.”

“I love you, Mr. Shawn,” I said. “I don’t say this easily or elegantly, coming from the Midwest, but I love your ass, Mr. Shawn. I’d die for you.”

I wanted to throw my arms around him. I wanted to, and I did.

“I love you, Bill,” I said. I kissed him on the cheek. He was somewhat impassive about this, but I believe he enjoyed it, in his own way. “I’ll never give up trying to write something that will please you, Bill. I’ll be writing for you the rest of my damn life. After you’re gone, Mr. Shawn, you will still be my Number 1 reader.”

The cameras were off. The cameramen were trying to reel Earl in toward the stern. So my big hug never got on film, but I didn’t care. I said what I needed to say.