None of this Ever Really Happened (2 page)

"Well, no . . ."

"I have one long piece I want to read. If you have something,
too, we'll read these and then go home."

"Well, I have one, but I'm still working on it."

"Try it. I want to hear it."

"Well, okay."

"You first," said John Fuller.

And David read a poem called "Supercargo." He shuffled
pages and started quietly, perhaps uncertainly, but his voice
rose and rose with the poem, and he stood forward on his
toes although he was tall to begin with. He was wonderful.
When he finally sat down, we found ourselves clapping.

Fuller took the podium and looked down for a long
moment at his loose sheets. "I can't follow that," he said finally,
and sat down, too. Oh, we had a party that night. The
girls dangled their bare summer legs from our dorm windows
over the Cherwell River, and we all laughed and sang
and passed bottles of Spanish Graves. We toasted David all
night long.

For the rest of the term, I spent as much time as I could
with David Lehman. We ate Chinese food because David
was homesick, hitchhiked to the seashore reciting poetry
between
rides and made plans to go to France, where David
said "the vegetables all taste like fruits." Before the end of the
summer, Fuller, who had a little basement press, had published
a broadsheet of David's poetry (I still have a copy of it
somewhere), and I knew I wanted to be a writer and was able
to say it aloud, at least to myself.

On Saturday evening Lydia Greene and I met some pals at
Davis Street Fish Market for dinner. It is the place we gather
most frequently because it has good, inexpensive seafood
and a wonderful oyster bar where we always start and often
finish the evening (sometimes we never get into the dining
room) with platters of oysters and clams, plates of calamari,
bowls of mussels, peel-and-eat shrimp, red beans and rice,
fresh sourdough
bread, and lots of good beer and wine.

As always, Officer Lotts was the first one there. He had
claimed our favorite table and was sipping a glass of pinot
grigio while reading the
Times
and waiting for the rest of us.
He is an unusual cop. A late child of middle-aged parents
who took him around the world and gave him everything
under the sun including a leafy suburban life, every album
ever made, and a gleaming white convertible with tan leather
interior when he was sixteen, Steve Lotts started saying at the
age of four that he wanted to be a Chicago policeman. "Sure,"
people said, "good!" But he was still saying it when he went to
college to study criminal justice, and still saying it after a year
spent as a guard at a nuclear-power plant, two and a half as
a paralegal, and four as an internal-affairs investigator when
he was finally admitted to the police academy. Even then
people were sure he would bail out and head for the suburbs,
but today he is an undercover gang-crimes cop who is on
the street every day and often night, and is one of the few
people I know who truly loves his work. He lives in an apartment
full of plants and cats, wears horn-rimmed glasses and
a Little Lord Fauntleroy haircut, and attracts wistful, waifish
women.

"Ride your bike?" I pulled out a stool.

"Yep." He pointed at it through the window locked to a
parking meter.

"Armed?" I asked lifting up his backpack.

"Of course," he said. He rarely goes anywhere without his
gun. I had been waiting all week to talk about Lisa Kim, and
I almost told Steve the story right then, but I knew I'd only
have to repeat it later, so I didn't. It was difficult.

Pretty soon everyone was there, laughing, eating, telling
stories. Carolyn O'Connor was dating a gastroenterologist
from Terre Haute. He took her for a walk through the woods
on a farm he owns in Brown County, and in a clearing they
came upon a table set with white linen, candles, a lovely meal,
glasses of wine already poured. "I have no idea how he did it."

Carolyn smiled; she may have the best smile in the world.
Carolyn's family and mine have summer homes in the
same Michigan beach resort, and I've always known her, although
I grew up playing with her older brothers and sisters.
Then when she moved to Chicago after law school and
rented an apartment with Steve Lotts on Fargo Street two
blocks from where Lydia and I were living, we started hanging
out with them and with Wendy Spitz, too, a lawyer pal of
Carolyn's from her law firm.

It was Wendy who turned to me that evening and said,
"I read that piece of yours about you and Lydia in Mexico."

"Me too," said Carolyn, "and I have a question for you."

"Is it really that beautiful?" Wendy asked.

"'Course it is," I said. "Why would you ask that?"

"Well, you know, travel writers . . ."

"It's like paradise," said Lydia, at the same time pointing
out that a lot of beautiful places are full of odd people.

"Like Charlie Duke," said Carolyn. "That was my question.
Is he a real person?"

"Oh, he's real," said Lydia.

Wendy said, "What I want to know is is he gay? You never
make it clear."

There ensued a rambling discussion of our friend Charlie,
his sexuality, his drinking habits, the drinking habits of homosexuals,
the definition of alcoholism, the trustworthiness
of alcoholics, whether it's possible to be friends with an alcoholic,
the nature of friendship, and the nature of love itself.
None of this was of any interest to me, but I hadn't yet seen
my opening into Lisa Kim. I crossed my arms and listened. I
felt like a sniper lying in wait.

"But can you love someone you can't trust?" asked Wendy.

"Of course you can," said Carolyn. "Think about children;
you love them but can't trust them. Even most teenagers.
Even a lot of old people."

"In fact," I said, "some people can't love someone they
do
trust. They lose interest." I wondered as soon as I said it
whether my statement had a subtext, and if it did, I wondered
if Lydia had picked up on it.

I didn't look at her, but I heard her say, "I don't think
that's real love."

"Oh, who the hell knows what real love is," I said quickly,
flippantly.

"Quick, change the subject," said Lydia. "Don't get him
started on love."

"Okay, what are we going to read about next, Pete?" asked
someone.

"Thailand. I'm going to Thailand over Christmas." I told
them I wanted to update the whole Europe-on-$5-a-day
idea of the sixties. Thailand on $50 a day and then a bunch
of other places in Asia and Latin America. "Gee, Pete," said
Steve, "how did you ever think of that?"

"I don't suppose you got a free airfare out of this, did
you?" asked someone else.

"Are you going, Lydia?" someone asked.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "I'm waiting for
his series on extravagant vacations in ridiculously opulent
places. This one's going to be overnight trains and bad noodle
houses and youth hostels with no air conditioning."

By now we'd all had a couple of drinks. There was the
briefest lull in the conversation, and I pulled the trigger. "I
gotta tell you guys about this accident I saw." For the most
part they listened attentively.

Afterwards Steve asked, "Did you have a cell phone?"

"No. I wish I did."

"So what do you think you could have done?" asked
Carolyn.

"He thinks he could have gotten out, opened her door,
turned her car off, and taken the keys," said Lydia. "That's
what he thinks."

"Okay, even if you could have done all of that, what next?"
asked Carolyn.

"What next? I'm not sure," I said.

She went on, "I mean, you're blocking traffic, both lanes.
Are you going to drive her car? What about
your
car?"

"What if she jumps out and gets run over?" asked
Wendy.

"You could be held responsible," said Officer Lotts. "You
could have been arrested yourself."

"For what?"

"What if she started screaming?" asked someone.

"Harassment," said Steve. "Assault. Who knows? Maybe
even kidnapping."

"But she was out of control! I mean, look what happened
for crying out loud."

"Yes, but it wouldn't have happened if you'd stopped her."
Wendy said that my only justification for interfering with
the drunk girl was that it did happen, and if I'd interfered,
it wouldn't have. No accident, no justification. She said I did
the right thing, which was nothing.

"How could it be the right thing if I had it within my
power to save someone's life, and I didn't do it?" I asked.
"But at what risk?" asked Steve. "Your own life, maybe?
Our rule is that you act only to help someone else when you
are sure that you are safe. Very first priority always is your
own safety."

"How about the fireman who goes into a burning building
to rescue someone?"

"He doesn't. He really doesn't. Not unless he's damn sure
and his supervisor's damn sure, too, that he can go in and
get back safely. A supervisor would never let his people go
in there under any other circumstance. It's rule number one.
Secure yourself first. Now if the roof caves in or the building
collapses, that's a different story, but you don't know that it's
going to happen."

"See, I think that's Pete's problem," said Carolyn. "He
knew what was going to happen. You know what I mean?
He could see it happen before it happened, and then it happened."
(Of course I now know that even if for a moment I
could see what was going to happen to Lisa Kim, I had no
idea what had already happened to her and would not for a
long time.)

"It's almost like a tree falling in the woods," said Wendy.

"Or like Pandora's box." Carolyn said that knowledge of
the future was the one thing that didn't get out of Pandora's
box, and for a moment I had it and was therefore very briefly
Godlike. She also said that since I'm Pete Ferry and not God,
I wanted to do something human, like fix things.

"I thought it was hope that didn't get out," said someone.

"Okay," I said, "I've got a legal question."

"No legal questions!" Wendy threw up her hands. "We're
off duty. No free legal advice. Besides, I'm quitting. I'm done
with the law."

We all moaned. We'd heard this many times.

"I'm done making rich people richer. I'm sick of this corporate
shit. I'm going to do something that matters with my
life." Wendy was off to the races about how she was going to
collect her bonus and resign her partnership, sell her condo,
see the world, run a marathon, learn Spanish, get an MBA,
and move to South America. "Within five years I intend to be
the finance minister of a small country somewhere in Latin
America!"

"Ándale!"
someone said.

"I'm going to finally do something fucking important
with my life!"

"Arriba!"
we cried. By this time the waitstaff was eyeing
us wearily. Later that night I lay awake in bed thinking about
doing something important with my life. I was aware even
then that something in me had changed. I was not sure what
it was or how big it was or how long it would last, but something
was different. I had seen another person die. I thought
about soldiers who can never quite come all the way back
from combat, can never really shop again for tube socks at
Wal-Mart or go all out for a foul pop-up or fall asleep on the
couch with a book turned over on their chests. Can never
even read a book or eat soup or make love without the knowledge
of what they've done or seen.

For me right then, it was the knowledge of what I hadn't
done. Oh, I knew that my friends were well-meaning, that
they were kind and wise and generous to reassure me and I
was sure they were right that any action I would have taken
could have failed or backfired or even exacerbated the situation,
but they were also missing the point. I saw someone
alive, and then I saw her dead, and in between I could have
acted at least theoretically, at least hypothetically, to change
the dynamic between those two things. Perhaps that's what
had changed. Perhaps I'd never realized before that I could
have such power. Perhaps I'd never even thought about it.

The first real writing I ever did was a bunch of short stories I
wrote as a senior thesis at Ohio University for Walter Tevis,
and I had been carrying around something that Tevis had
said to me ever since, something that despite the fact that I'd
spent much of my life writing made me hesitate to call myself
a writer.

I would love to say that Walter Tevis was my mentor, but
it would be more accurate to say that I wanted him to be my
mentor, and he tried to be, sort of. I don't think that I was
very mentorable because I was only playing at being a writer,
trying it on as you might a suit of clothes, and I think he
knew that, but he was kind and indulgent and treated me as
a mentee even if we both knew we were faking it.

Tevis was a goofy, gangly, buck-toothed man who knew
Paul Newman and drank wine, sometimes too much. I'm not
telling tales out of school here; he was candid about his drinking
and used to joke that the only day of the year he didn't
drink was New Year's Eve, "amateur night," and every New
Year's Day he gave a brunch so he could enjoy his bleary-eyed
friends and welcome the new year with a Bloody Mary.
About Paul Newman: He had supposedly and very briefly—if
at all—attended Ohio University, and we as undergrads were
much more impressed that Tevis knew him than that the reason
he knew him was because he had written two novels called
The Hustler
and
The Color of Money
that had been made into
movies starring Newman. This all made Tevis something of
a local celebrity, and I considered myself lucky to get into his
creative-writing class as a junior and luckier still when he
agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to sponsor my independent-writing
project the year I came back from Oxford.