One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (9 page)

This is what I’m supposed to do
, I thought. After that moment, I never doubted it.

On an early summer evening beneath a dusk-marbled sky I broke a promise I never believed I could keep: I did not walk across my graduation stage, did not take diploma in hand, in stride, and walk off into an imagined future where
the sway of the past wasn’t so crushing, so absolute. I sat with the rest of my graduating class, some of whom had been with me the day of my injury six years before and had watched the ambulance approach the long weeds which had swallowed me up and the paramedics who had gone down into the ditch where I lay, broken and numb, staring up at the sky. That night we gathered in the middle of a football field, seated in folding chairs, listening to tepid bromides about the future, and our place in it, and what we should do and how we should live in order to shape that future. I wanted it to be over.

In the bleachers on both sides of the fields, family members fired cameras in the expanding darkness and hooted stupidly to fill up any pause or silence or moment in which we were not actively assured we would never be forgotten. That time held for us special affection and the sense that we’d never grow old, or at least no older than that night, or the bright morning after, or maybe the end of that Last Summer, When Real Life Begins.

From where I sat at the end of a row, tented in red regalia with a mortarboard clipped into my hair with barrettes, though I could feel it slipping back, I could see a young man in a wheelchair, older than me, seated by a fence. In his lap sat his girlfriend, and the whole ceremony they had kissed, their faces turned to give best access to their hunger.

Until my name was called and I had to roll over the uneven sod towards the twenty-foot-long ramp to the stage,
they held my interest, and then I forgot their queasy sideshow and went forward to receive my diploma. Bob Burnes waited there with it, and when I reached the taped X on the stage where we had been instructed to pause for a photograph I stopped, hearing applause stir in the crowd, but thought of his promise and whether he’d mention it.

The photographer’s cue and then his camera’s starburst froze us in tableau.

Bob Burnes said nothing but congratulations and my name though beneath them both I sensed the pull of years and a guilt that couldn’t quite be assuaged.

Early in my freshman year of college, I was mugged by a man who had followed me all morning long. Early to campus, I had time to waste, to blithely wander around in the autumn air, missing obvious clues he was tracking me, in and out of buildings, through parking lots and up ramps. He had even circled around me two times, passing by me on a sidewalk and then, later, waiting for me by a door, calling out to ask if I needed his help with it, even though I had been twenty feet from him and moving farther away each second. I thought nothing much of it, accustomed to the near-constant entreaties of strangers, though I should have known better.

We lived a few miles from a small state school; its presence forestalled any thoughts of leaving home for college, at least then, and the costs of living alone, paying out of pocket for health care attendants to bathe and dress me and at night return me to bed, were too great for the idea to take much root. Six years after breaking my neck, I was too accustomed to a compromised life, in which the usual choices were often out of reach, to feel any true regret. In truth, anyplace removed from the tedium of high school was an oasis.

I now had no one to write for me in the classes I took: Introduction to Music, Composition, and an algebra course so remedial I was unsure if I was attending by mistake. At first, this solitude felt strange, after six years of someone at my side. I fretted over notes: a
college
lecture was nothing like the rote recitations of high school, I was sure, and how could I retain it without notes? The thought of asking to borrow notes bothered me, as if it were borrowed money, a kind of debt I would be forced into. I waited, though, listening closely, reading carefully, and began to wonder if I had ever really required an assistant all those years. The freedom to be only myself, to engage with learning without any mediation, was a revelation. This place, and these pursuits, were my own, and would be in the future, I felt, and it was exhilarating.

But that morning, having arrived early, I went from the parking lot where my mother had dropped me off in our family’s
van, now equipped with a lift, to the campus student center. The cafeteria was empty and the frayed couches lining the hallways and lobby held nobody I knew. TVs mounted to the wall burbled faint streams of noise. I roamed the first floor, bored, hoping to see a classmate or even a professor.

There were two elevators in the building: one which rose to offices on the top floor, the other, located behind several heavy doors, which I had to push open with my wheelchair. The second elevator lowered into the building’s basement. From the basement, untrafficked and dim except for a red emergency light, one could enter the campus game room where students played pool and Ping-Pong and fed quarters to a jukebox.

I knew a few students who would go down there, skipping classes, flirting with the girl behind the counter, who made change and rented the pool tables and hated her life, or her fate, whatever had landed her there, where it smelled like old cigarettes and burning tube socks. When I found no one I knew on the ground floor, I decided to take the elevator down to the game room. If nothing else, I could listen to the jukebox pouring out bad music or watch desultory bouts of Ping-Pong. Game, set, match.

The labyrinth of hallways leading to the elevator was empty but damp, like a sauna the world forgot. I pushed through the heavy doors and traveled down a long hallway, past steaming kitchens and carts burdened by pastries and boxed lunches and carafes of coffee and tea. I wanted more
than anything to see someone who would in return be glad to see me.

At the elevator, I jabbed the down button with the mouth stick I always carried with me and waited for its doors to open. A tinny bell rang after a moment, and inside the rarely used car I went. The buttons were hard to reach, and I had to lean forward to reach them as the doors began to slide shut. But then the elevator car lurched, and the doors slid open again.

Someone else had entered. I pushed the down button again, after stretching out to reach it. The car began to descend after its doors sealed us in.

Over my right shoulder, behind me I could see a young man. When I recognized him, I froze. His hand was already deep inside my backpack, where the furious rustle of his hands was plain. I didn’t want to antagonize him or escalate the situation. So far removed from the rest of the building, no one would hear if I called out for help and no one would come.

I pretended not to notice what was happening—I sat there as we descended, eyes pressed shut.

He found my wallet, a cheap green Mickey Mouse wallet given to me one Christmas by my twin brothers. In the elevator’s brushed steel, through one half-opened eye, I could see his blurry hand hide my wallet in his jacket.

The doors opened and I backed my wheelchair out of the car, so scared I crashed against the side of it. I just wanted out.

He was holding the doors open for me.

“You OK, buddy?” he asked. “You sure you’ve got it?”

Scared, addled, surprised by his speaking, I had no idea what to say.

“No, no, I’ve got it,” I said. “I’m OK.”

His front teeth were missing, and livid, alluvial bruises spread down from his eyes, and he sat behind a table stacked with new copies of the undergraduate student literary journal. I assumed he had been beaten up, viciously battered to the point it hurt me to look at him, but I wanted to know his other secret: how I might be admitted into a poetry workshop, or help with production of the journal. I wanted to belong to a group I was still learning how to define. I wanted to know what that belonging meant. At the dim horizon of what seemed to me like my future, I could see what a writer’s life was like, and more than anything that life was what I wanted.

Looking over the copies, covers in black and white, the lithe figure of a woman’s back curving back into shadow, I tried to formulate something cogent. I waited around a long time while he sketched absently on notebook paper, less interested in art than in passing the time. Whorls of ink bloomed and divagated from margin to margin. Finally, I was ready to say something, all nerves and sweaty twitch.

“Are these free?” I asked, the best I could manage. He looked up at me, his face punched in, bloody.

“Yeah, take as many as you want,” he mumbled.

I had expected to pay something for the copies, a few bucks at most, a dollar at least. Most of the poems inside had seemed fake, echoes of echoes, and hadn’t interested me. But a few poems, weird and surreal, felt like they carried inside of them the spark of something true.

“Really?” I asked, taken aback. I wanted to befriend him, or at least introduce myself in some way. “I’ve wanted to get a copy since I saw the cover on a flyer.”

He nodded, kind, but not especially interested.

“How do you get into the poetry workshop?” I blurted. “How do you do that? What do I need to do? Or who do I talk to to get permission?”

“Uh, you just sign up.” He blinked. “Like any other class. When it’s time to enroll. You sign up. That’s all.”

That it was no more complicated than that felt like a bit of a letdown. In my mind, I had been certain it would be difficult, a trial of signatures and permissions. Meetings in
dank, book-strewn offices with professors who had no idea who I was and didn’t care very much and chances to prove to them how much poetry meant to me and what I hoped to find within it, and, most importantly, within myself.

I had been writing poems in satisfying furies: the carriage of the typewriter I used for homework at home shuttled back and forth across the page with every line. Tactile, immediate, typing introduced me to the pleasure of creating, of making. I had no idea what a poet might be, or do, but I knew I wanted to be one, and would do whatever it took.

That first workshop was filled with recognizable types: the gothic, draped in black; the ingénue; and the affably oafish fraternity brother, looking for an easy A, at least at first, until stirred by something unexpected (in this case, he would disappear just before semester’s end, only to reappear in the police blotter, accused of rape); others who dabbled, who wrote in journals, who had been encouraged by family members to follow their smatter of talent; and me, the true believer, the one mad for it all, borrowing Whitman and Ginsberg and Denis Johnson like I had been starved, the one who shadowed professors with new poems and the crazy belief that it all mattered, that it was important, that it was transformative, that this was romantic and true. I couldn’t escape the
notion that I was alone, in a broken body, stuck in the places between that body and everyone else, and that maybe each word and every line and all the poems I wrote were a tether, a rope by which I could hang on to the world, and not be left behind entirely, which I feared more than anything.

In a Viking history class I met a girl named Mona, her voice the twirl and lilt of some rural, unknown place. She was short and dark-haired and solicitous in a kind way; she was always early to class, the first to arrive, sitting in a desk beside the door. Every day when I entered class she spoke, bright eyes and syrupy twang. It was no time before a crush on her had gripped me, though I said nothing of it when we began to chat before class. Music, movies, the Vinland Sagas we were parsing our way through—whatever I could think of to continue the tenuous strand of conversation between strangers. I would arrive at class as early as I could, even as I derided myself for being so obvious, so pathetic. Still, two days a week I hurried through crowds of students, who barely could be bothered to part, to one side or the other. Once, racing through rain, I slid from the sidewalk, into mud, and my tires shed red clay all that miserable day.

The professor was balding, snaggletoothed, sublimely acerbic. His hands gripped befouled coffee mugs like claws. He barked and guffawed and had no illusions that I was somehow delicate, grunting my last name.

Mona sat two rows over from me in the narrow classroom, one seat back. Always a flutter in my peripheral vision, she took notes that seemed to capture every syllable in wiry loops of ink. If I didn’t stare straight ahead, she’d be there, a feathered blur at the edge of my sight. I tried to bore my eyes into the wall, the tattered map of America’s topography unspooled beside the murky chalkboard.

Still, there were days when I had no interest in the knobby spine of the Appalachian mountains and let myself watch her. Her studiousness, which seemed to seep the air from my lungs. There was a day I learned nothing when she applied lotion to her darkened legs, oblivious, intent. Another day when, passing through a parking lot, I stumbled on her in her car, furtively changing out of her workout clothes. For a moment all I could see was hurried, undifferentiated skin, a blur which took my breath.

Over time we became friends. Nothing more would come of it. Entering class one day, I spoke to Mona, as always, but noticed a young girl, six or seven, in a desk beside her, coloring spare paper with outsized boredom. Mona introduced me to her daughter, who didn’t look up from her crayons until scolded. I said hello but my eyes had gone instead to Mona’s left hand, where there was now a simple wedding band. And always had been. In my naiveté, I’d never considered that she might be married. That surprise must have been evident.

“I bet you didn’t know I had a little girl,” she said, her face amused.

“I didn’t even know you were married.”

Mona paused a moment, tapping her pen. Her daughter had returned to coloring.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, not sad, not wistful, not any single emotion, looking out a window, but not really. “Since I was fifteen.”

The story was too familiar, too obvious, to be further surprised: older boyfriend, pregnancy, small-town scandal, forced wedding. Alongside that narrative, my own foolishness played out, weeks of mooning for what I could not have.

In some ways, we grew closer, as if this last bit of elided biography had prevented any friendship beyond that of the casual acquaintance. As if she’d brought her daughter along rather than speak of her existence.

And, yet, in that closeness, in which we continued to talk, had lunch, occasionally studied, I withdrew, willing to be a friend, to listen, to be an ear receptive to her long unhappiness. I was kind and patient and, above all, present. She could open her heart to me because I was safe, incapable of acting.

I nursed a kind of bitterness and was ashamed. I listened and spoke and tried to craft consolation from whatever I could, whatever I had, which didn’t feel like much.

Mona knew where I lived with my family and sometimes would call if nearby to see if she could drop in. She would bring lunch from a fried fish house nearby, which had a bus
sized catfish in its front lawn. Battered cod or shrimp, hush puppies that sweated grease into their cardboard containers. Taught to be polite, I always ate the food, which was either awful or sublime or both all at once, depending on how little you cared for the integrity of your heart.

The following summer, after Viking history, Mona appeared once more at our home. Outside, everything broiled beneath a pane of faded-out sky. She asked if she could take a swim in our pool, out behind our house. The moment felt wrong or warped but I said why not, that she could change in the bathroom.

She wanted to talk, even through the door, which left me beside it to listen and respond. A minute or two passed. She announced she was coming out.

Mona stepped out in a two-piece swimsuit the color of foamed milk. The curls of her hair were tied up in a chestnut haze. Her top covered her breasts entirely, or would have, if not for the mesh pane between them, and the freckled skin it exposed.

Mona walked down the hallway into the living room, where the door to the back porch and steps down to the pool were located. She hadn’t said a word. My mother was watching television in the living room while knitting.

Mona waved to my mother before opening the door, before speaking to me.

“Do you like my swimsuit, Paul?”

I nodded dumbly and followed her out to the heat and the water and the stage of her loneliness. I watched her laze through the water, dipping under its lacquered surface, laughing like a child. In that heat, I couldn’t follow any conversation. Due to my quadriplegia, I was susceptible to sunstroke. Too long in that light would leave me weak, the sound of my blood in my ears, spots of light flecking my sight. As she swam, I tried not to reach that point.

When I had retreated to shadow thrown from the roof’s eave, Mona lifted herself from the pool and covered herself with a beach towel. It was time, she said, that she go. She would be late to pick up her daughter. In her clothes again, by my bedroom door, Mona seemed sad. My body couldn’t cool. That was all that I cared—that was all that I wanted. And for her to go. To take nothing more.