The Last American Man (19 page)

It was a dreadful year.

But years pass. And so do heartaches. Soon after Valarie left, along came Mandy. “Hello, Beautiful,” Eustace wrote to this
new love. “I appreciate getting to know you better . . . you have a lot to offer. When you can open up to this world we will
be blessed for it. I feel dizzy learning you, dizzy meeting you. I do feel we were meant to come to- gether. . . . When I
am with you I feel young and innocent. I could smile into your eyes forever . . .”

Then Mandy left, and along came Marcia. “I am high from meeting Marcia. She has been a blessing to me—an inspiration and a
new hope. I pray for God’s guidance in all that I do.”

Then along came Dale. “So kind, so supportive, she shares my vision as well as anyone.”

Then there was Jenny. “A beautiful girl with black hair and a long white linen dress . . . what will become of you, of me,
of desires, of dreams?”

Then there was Amy. “Beautiful long hair, innocent, radiant smile, I met her when I was teaching a workshop in a school, and
she was so beautiful I could hardly concentrate on my words. I just kept staring at her and then went up to her after class
and said, ‘Can I spend some time with you?’ ”

Eustace ended up spending a good deal of time with Amy. She was a graduate student in science, brilliant and serious, and
she turned out to be a great helper. He spent a week with her in her family’s summer house on Cape May, New Jersey, and wrote
in his journal:

“We have been housebound the week I have been here. We have gotten into paperwork for Turtle Island, with Amy typing things
out on her computer and printing out master copies for me to Xerox later or mail out or whatever is appropriate . . . summer
camp brochure, summer camp application, medical information and release form, lists of what should be in first-aid kits, emergency
plan cards and hospital maps . . . a letter to Cabell Gragg to encourage him to sell me the land in 1994, a letter to the
Turtle Island staff to thank and encourage them, list of staff members, names and phone numbers for my calendar, workshop
advertisement for spring classes, list of what to bring and not to bring (revised) and orientation for campers when they come
. . . confirmation contracts and more . . . Wow. Amy is very good at coming up with first-class results—a bit slow, but top-quality
finished product.”

Then Amy was gone, her letters filed away in an envelope that Eustace labeled: “A fantasy with Amy that was spoiled by reality—dreams
turned into education. At least I lived it for what it is and learned.”

Then there was Tonya, the beautiful and mysterious Aboriginal rock-climber. Eustace and Tonya went off to New Zealand and
Australia for a few months and climbed every cliff and mountain they could find. She was stunning and powerful, and Eustace
truly loved her, but he believed there was something hidden in her soul that held back from loving him completely, and, anyway,
it was hard for Eustace to give his heart to her as much as he might have liked to because of the recent memory of the one
woman who had almost broken him in half with passion and desire and misery.

That was Carla. Carla, the beautiful and mysterious Appalachian folk singer, was the massive love of Eustace Conway’s life.
He met her at a folk festival where he was speaking and she was singing. (“You should have seen this girl on stage playing
her guitar with her long hair and miniskirts, dancing and grinding all over the place until you damn near had to mop up the
whole
world
, she was that hot.”) Eustace withered and melted and collapsed into love for Carla, and to this day thinks she’s the closest
to an ideal he’s ever encountered.

“She was amazing. Here was this beautiful, modern Appalachian woman, a genuine coal miner’s daughter from Kentucky who had
skills from four generations back of the people I admire the most in my culture. She was like a goddess to me. She played
music, wrote, danced, was the best cook I’ve ever met . . . was wild and free and brave and brilliant and confident and with
an incredible, flexible, muscular, bronzed body. She worked with horses, could play any instrument, could cook a pie over
an open fire, make medicinal herbs, make her own soap, could butcher livestock, wanted to have lots of children . . . was
the most capable and generous and insatiable lover I’ve ever met. God, I could go on and on! . . . She was a true child of
nature, and she wore sexy gingham oldtimey dresses and danced through the woods like a young deer. And she was so talented
it made me feel I would drop everything to help her advance her career as a musician. And she was much smarter than me! And
she could sew and she could draw! And she could
spell!
She could do anything! This woman was a dream beyond even
my
capacity to dream, and I’m a goddamn dreamer!”

Almost immediately, Eustace asked Carla to marry him. And she threw back her head with laughter and said, “It would be my
pleasure, Eustace.”

So they got engaged, and Carla moved up to Turtle Island. Now, looking back, Carla says there were serious problems from the
start. “I felt he was a kindred spirit at first. But it was no more than six weeks into the relationship that I saw things
about him that frightened me. I come from an old-fashioned and rigid Appalachian patriarchy, so I was very sensitive about
some of the gender roles I saw Eustace playing out. In some ways, he had a true egalitarian sense about women, but every time
he got furious at me for not putting dinner on the table exactly at the right time, it made me really nervous.

“Also, my family disliked Eustace intensely. They thought he was disingenuous, a con artist. They were concerned about the
power he had over me. We’d only just met when he came to my family’s house, had a quick dinner with my parents, packed up
my belongings, and took me away. My family is really close, and they felt like I’d been stolen. Eustace thought my family
was turning me against him, so he tried to keep me isolated from them. Well, when my father and my brothers realized that,
they practically loaded their guns onto their truck to come and get me back.”

It wasn’t long before Carla, a world-class free spirit, began to drift. Soon, she was involved with someone else. Eustace
discovered her indiscretion in the strangest way. He got an enormous phone bill one month—hundreds of dollars of phone calls
placed from his office in the middle of the night to the same number. Curious, Eustace dialed the number, and when a man answered,
Eustace explained his situation. Then he had an inspiration.

“You don’t happen to know someone named Carla, do you?” he asked.

“Sure,” said the guy. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“No kidding,” Eustace said. “And here I thought she was my fiancée.”

It seems that Carla had been sneaking out of the teepee every night and hiking down to the office to call this sexy banjo
player she’d been having an affair with. Another betrayal. This was not, as the old cowboy song goes, Eustace Conway’s first
rodeo. And, as we know, Eustace is not a man who can live with someone he perceives to be a liar and cheat. Carla had to go.
It had been a marathon love affair, and now it was over.

Eustace was unraveled by it. He was flattened. He was
riven
.

In December 1993, he wrote in his journal: “Fighting depression, resentment, and pain. It really hurts, the relationship with
Carla, the rejection, the ‘not working out.’ I have never tried so hard—I gave it everything I had. I have never hurt so much.”

He was thirty-two years old and was shocked to look around and suddenly notice that, while he had accomplished much through
sheer force of will, he didn’t have a wife and children. By this point, he should have been well into a family. Where was
the beautiful woman with the loose curls and the gingham dress making buttermilk pancakes in the breaking light of dawn? Where
were the strong and sturdy youngsters, playing quietly on the cabin floor and learning from their gentle father how to whittle
hickory? Where had Eustace gone wrong? Why couldn’t he keep these women he fell in love with? They always seemed oppressed
or overwhelmed by him. And he didn’t feel they understood him or supported him. Maybe he was picking the wrong kind of person.
Maybe he was incapable of sustaining intimacy or was too fearful of being hurt to let a relationship take its often twisty
turns. Maybe he needed to try a new approach. It was becoming clear that, in love, Eustace was failing to make this most essential
connection.

He asked a friend who was a psychologist to come to Turtle Island for a walk one day. He took her in the woods and told her
that he feared that there was something wrong with him emotionally, that he couldn’t make his relationships with other people
work. The folks he labored with at Turtle Island were always angry at him or misunderstanding him, and he wasn’t as close
to his brothers as he would like to be, and he was always driving women away or not getting close enough to trust people.
He told her about his childhood and confessed that he still held a lot of pain about his father and wondered whether this
was all connected.

“I think I need to talk to a professional,” he said.

The psychologist answered, “Everything you need to make you happy, Eustace, is right here in this forest. Modern psychology
isn’t for you. You’re the healthiest person I know.”

Man, do people ever get a dream of Eustace Conway in their minds and then make it
stick
. This woman must have been so compelled by a Thoreau-inspired and idealized vision of life in the wilderness (“There can
be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still”) that she didn’t want to take
a closer look at someone who was not a concept, but a real and afflicted person. Maybe it would have cost her too much to
let go of her idea of Eustace. It’s hard to blame her; she wouldn’t have been the first woman to deny all appearances to keep
this pagan savage as pure in her heart as he was the day she first met him.

Not necessarily convinced, and still deeply depressed, Eustace tried his father one more time.

“I am psychologically sick,” he wrote to his dad, “beaten down by years of oppression. I am damaged. I hurt. Every day I wake
up and I am in pain over this. Show this letter to a psychologist and see if they have any advice for me. Please don’t misunderstand
my most sincere gratitude for the help you give me with chores like money management. I do
very much
appreciate it. I hope that rather than be interpreted as an ‘attack,’my emotional truths can be appreciated as fuel for growth
and understanding. A healthier relationship is my goal, not a more aggravated one. Respectfully, Eustace.”

Again, no response.

I know Eustace Conway’s parents well. I’ve been a guest in their home and eaten dinner with them many times. Like everybody
else, I call Mrs. Conway “Big Mom,” and, like everyone else, I adore her. I love her generosity and her stories about when
she lived in Alaska. I love that, whenever I come to her door, she hugs me and says, “There’s our mountain girl!”

And I must admit that I enjoy being around Eustace Conway’s father. I like his intelligence and his wit, and I find him to
be endlessly inquisitive in the same bizarre and precise way as his son; he wants to know exactly how many hours it took me
to drive from Boone to Gastonia, and when I tell him, he calculates immediately (and correctly) that I must have stopped for
forty-five minutes to have a meal or I would have arrived sooner. His precision, of course, is relentless. Being a “creature
of perfect logic,” he doesn’t yield an inch and I can see where he would be impossible to live with. His conversations with
his wife are filled with such baffling exchanges:

MRS. CONWAY:
There’s a slight chance that Judson will come visit tomorrow.

MR. CONWAY:
Why do you say that? You don’t know that to be true at all. Did he call to say he was coming?

MRS. CONWAY:
No, but I left a message on his machine to invite him.

MR. CONWAY:
Then it’s puzzling to me why you would say that there is a slight chance he’s coming to visit us. Exactly what
percentage of a chance do you suppose that would be, Karen, when we haven’t heard from the boy at all? Obviously, we know
nothing about whether he will be coming or not. To say that there is a “slight chance” is incorrect and misleading of you.

MRS. CONWAY:
I’m sorry.

MR. CONWAY:
But nobody listens to my opinions.

So you can imagine.

Still, I can talk to the man. When I visit the Conways, I often talk to Big Eustace about the
Wizard of Oz
books, the wonderful series of fantasy stories that L. Frank Baum wrote back at the turn of the century. It seems that Big
Eustace and I were both raised reading the same beautiful hardcover editions of these books. (In Mr. Conway’s childhood, he
received one book a year as a Christmas present, while I inherited the entire antique set from my grandmother.) Most people
don’t know that there were sequels to the original Dorothy Gale story, so Big Eustace was delighted to find that I knew the
stories well and could recall each lush Art Deco illustration and discuss the most obscure characters. Tik-Tok, Billina the
Chicken, the Hungry Tiger, the Gnome King, the Rollers, and Polychrome (the rainbow’s daughter)—I know them all, and so does
he, and we can talk about that stuff for hours.

Other times, he takes me out to his yard and teaches me about the birds of North Carolina. And once we went outside at midnight
to look at the stars.“Have you seen Mars lately?” Mr. Conway asked. I admitted that I had not, so he pointed it out to me.
He told me that he likes to come out every night to follow that planet’s orbit in order to see how close Mars is drifting
toward Saturn.

“They’ve been getting closer and closer each day for three months,” he said. “After all, remember what the word ‘planet’ means—wandering
body.”

So sometimes Big Eustace and I talk about books and sometimes we talk about opera and sometimes we talk about constellations.
But mostly we talk about his son. Big Eustace always wants to know how Little Eustace is doing up there at Turtle Island.
Who are his apprentices? Is he planning any big trips? Has he constructed more buildings? How does that treacherous road up
the mountain look? Does he seem overworked or depressed?