Self Among Others

In my beginning is my end.

—T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"

          The first time I went into the cement building with the big cross on it, set at the top of the hill like a pan of bread dough slowly rising, I was 10. Nannie ordered us off across the Betzwood Bridge not to church but to Sunday School, which has no Hell—only pianos on wheels and classroom doors with paper hands and crayon-heightened Jesuses taped onto the glass.
          The two stories sat upon one another like Duncan Hines layers, with a portico running the length between them like escaping frosting. The ground floor was a dark labyrinth of little rooms, but upstairs was a single meeting hall, airy and open as a ballroom, with a stainless steel kitchen at one end and a small stage at the other—the whole studded by curtainless casement windows gazing down onto the tiny green cemetery like portholes. 
          Poppy just dropped us off, and I didn't know which tiny room to enter. I was terrified of the families—all familiar to one another—and at the end of the hour we never went back.

* * *

Trailer Park in Trooper

          I sit at the giant monitor scrutinizing two different roads, both flanked by buildings that would have been there in 1965. Did I ride past either in the back seat of my mother's car—one an auto repair, the other a formal wear shop? Which one led to Nannie's trailer?
          Hers was on a corner, to the left of the road. In the middle of the night the furnace failed and soot fell on the interior like black snow.
          The memory itself immolates, white and diaphanous as ash. It cannot bear my weight.
          Was my mother away again on some long weekend date?
          Was she, as I have been told, a prostitute?

* * *

          My obsession with the past refuses to cow down long to the wisdom of my fifth decade. I can make it disappear for a little while, but it returns—a genetic tide.

          Alone with my personality, often I long for my own, flawed kin.

          Heavy smokers, as I recall.

          The money-loaning, Sunday-phoning world around me doesn't fit my blood: all the adjectives that won't get used. I dig for their stories but rarely pull a gem.

          I cannot stop describing what happened to me.

          Nannie, topless, sitting at the foot of the bed. I said "I see your shopping bags!" 

          It was my first simile, and the family repeated it laughingly until Nannie died, on a cold Friday in December.

          I was walking home from school and suddenly my mother's car pulled up alongside. Brian was in the passenger seat in his black leather jacket, staring at the windshield, and I knew something was wrong.

          After a binge, she had vomited, ruby-black like coffee grounds, into a small plastic pail. Afterward, someone had just placed it in the bathtub. 

          I still have its unused twin.

          She was a great cook, Nannie, and she is supposed to have studied with James Beard. They had a sandwich place in Arizona, for a while. Then she worked in the kitchen at Bungalow Inn, on Ridge Pike. We stopped by, once, and she took me into the back and gave me maraschino cherries from the massive, restaurant-sized jar.

          She was talented, caustic, bigoted, profoundly unstable, and her verbal caricature was unsettlingly accurate. She smoked Kools from a jade-green plastic case. She drank crème de menthe straight, from a bottle in her bathroom closet.

          Her oldest daughter drank herself to death at 37.

          My brother Jimmy smoked himself to death at 55.

          My father shot himself at 33.

          My brother Bruce was a rock star.

          I have a hard time concentrating.

          Still, my mind drives along the roads of Jeffersonville, trying to remember the buildings then: the drive-in bank on the corner, across from the fire station, the S&H Green Stamps store, the animal hospital, and the tiny drive-up photo place.

          Their lives were squeezed between Collegeville and Norristown like folders, and my feeble memory brings them back, reeking of smoke, hard-working and broke, pleasure-loving, self-destructive, violent, remorseful, fashionable, and tall. 

          Oh the colorful ashtrays! 

October Morning

          Coming downstairs so late, the sun is already in the kitchen.
          The house smells lovely, but from what source I cannot tell—as if a lady from church had walked through, or someone had cooked and then cleaned up, fastidiously, leaving behind a ghostly soupçon.
          It is a holiday-morning smell, free of drudgery or resignation.
          I pick the carcass of last night's roasted chicken and chop celery ends and old fists of onion I've saved for the stock—drawn into the kitchen by an invisible hand, or just the bright October sun itself.
          In goes a Bay leaf, and before long the aroma of poultry and herb—the anthropomorphism of loving security itself—inhabits the rooms like gathered friends, throwing their coats on the armchairs, laughing and smoking.
          The sensation of richness, the wealth of one's experience, is overwhelming, not diminished now by the empty house or rickety memories ... or by the fact that it is past.
          The dog rolls upon his back, rubbed by tender, invisible hands.

The Corner Property

          It was on one of those walks with Jamie in the last year of his life that I saw the raised beds and pots of tomato vines.
          Gripping the pavement with his bowed, short front paws—turned inward slightly like a furry alligator's—our four o'clock walks in the neighborhood advanced my status in the world somewhat as, three years later, would marriage. Accompanying the ancient, slow-moving but determined, jet-black and grey Scottish terrier past the houses, eventually carrying but seldom needing the day-glo orange leash, I met a 50ish mixed-race couple who walked their Beagle, "Buttercup," and passed children who would stop their play on a cold winter afternoon and call to me, earnestly like adults, "I like your dog's coat!" I still have the mackintosh plaid jacket, lovingly folded, in my bureau drawer.
          One May, as we reached the end of 9th Street, I stopped and admired the raised beds, still nothing but dirt and labels, and the fetal tomato vines in their pottery cribs—all newly installed in a sunny spot on the lawn. Without being told, somehow I knew the corner house was a rental, and that a new and environmentally conscious family had moved in, personalizing the lot as one puts a framed photo or a potted violet on an office desk.
          A colorful, fat plastic tricycle appeared one day, then an old-fashioned wagon on another. Once, the dad was leaning into the hatch of a car, pulling out the headboard of a bed as his daughter watched. His sturdy, hairy young thighs met the bottom of his shorts like Corinthian columns, and I briefly swooned. Finally, on a warm afternoon, we saw two little girls, on the sidewalk in the front of the house, with their mother. 
          Everyone investigated Jamie, and I held my breath as the tots circled him and leaned in to pat his head. Their mother seemed to be holding her breath, too, and calming herself by asking me questions about the dog. But Jamie overcame his breed characteristics and geriatric grouchiness—a gentleman from the Highlands.
          In those moments the glacier of myself among others withdrew a few centimeters, and the two large city blocks themselves shrank, proportionately, as familiar faces and houses sprang from anonymity, like the thumbs of lettuce appeared in the beds, or how the yellow starbursts opened on the vines.
          I was the man with a handsome dog. A character in a novel. A person on the block.
          But the bag of lactated Ringer's solution we injected under the skin of Jamie's neck each night slowed down its magic, and our walks, as summer came on in fullness, grew short. One night as Gary started to slip the huge needle into him, his wasted body shivering in fear, I simply said—a bit before I was aware of meaning to—"No more."
          Today, I took a different way home from the store and passed the corner property. There's a beige patch in the grass where the raised beds were, and the curtainless windows of the corner room, one facing the front and the other facing the side, gaze off like a ship's bow.
          The heart numbs.

Conversation in an Italian Restaurant

          The face was a young man of about 25 but the voice was a woman's, elegant and high and accented—Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.
          It took me many glances to understand this.
          His dark hair was a 50s buzz cut and his blue short-sleeve shirt seemed hard-pressed to make it all the way down his ectomorph's flank. Two grandmothers sat with him, one on his side and the other across the table.
          Whunn you haff a high IQ you either find a suit-a-ble ac-tiv-i-ty or turn to alcohol and drugs. This is how it tis.
          Because I have fallen in love with lesbians—unbeknownst—I had to keep glancing, over my left shoulder and uncomfortably backward. Yes, yes, it was a boy, despite that voice.
          My ravioli arrived.
          The old ladies mixed their Castillian with their English in the chic manner I had only heard—when I was 25—in Buenos Aires. I could not tell whether the boy was Andalusian or Swedish (or Czech). I only knew he was long-waisted and bony and he spoke like an actress in a Turner Classic Movie. 
          You either meet good people and be-gin to do good things or you meet bahd people and do bahd things. There is no in be-tween. You must be-lieve this.
          A single block from the office, once again coming to the always empty restaurant placed me into a completely different world. Sometimes the other diners were in real estate, or investing, and one lunchtime I sat listening to a table of two sisters and their brother—all in their late 60s—arguing whose life had been more financially ruinous and more deserving of the vast inheritance apparently in the balance.
          These conversations always trumped my Kindle, and, again, I laid my glasses down beside the cheap cutlery and expensive napkin.
          One of the grannies pays the bill, and the boy is not troubled by responsibility, is not aware of the bill or, perhaps, even the food. He is calm and desperate at the same time. He is a character from Tennessee Williams.
          His hair is too short and his shirt is too drab but his face is cinematic like Montgomery Clift's. Nothing he says in the short time I am near him builds upon anything else. It is not linear, and the old ladies—one at each side—hold him, psychically, like a balloon.
          The big empty room full of tables is dark, and the only light comes from one long window that faces the quiet street.
          I wonder what it is like to wake up next to him: what it is like to observe someone in a brief physiological moment—as I observed Bob, 30 years ago, his hair tousled and his perfect features crimped by sleep—who lives always within the cerebral, or the artistic, or just the neurotic.
          The reverse of this would be watching a boxer play an oboe.
          One of the grandmothers says I never thought Robin Williams was funny, and the other echoes her ... no, not funny. I wait with particular attention for the young man's response to this, but I cannot hear it.
          I pay my bill and leave.
          There is no in-between.

In the Poet's Back Yard

          Sweet July air hits me as I unhook the rope across the doorway. The tour has moved on toward the smothering interior of the house and I turn back like a rip tide, apologizing to the man behind the desk.
          I sit on a bench. Under a tree. In Robert Frost's back yard. 
          Deeper than two emerald football fields, the clearing—like everything else in New Hampshire—is sheathed in woods. A graveyard of Buicks and pick-up trucks in the 1950s that angered the Pulitzer winner and Camelot celebrity, who may have driven past it on the way to an award ceremony or a weekend with an heiress, now it lies quietly under the sun, a woolly blanket with perhaps a tiny rise here or there that might be a ghostly stack of hubcaps, metal pancakes that refused decay.
          The air is hot but enough to move the leaves in their sideways gestures, tiny green hands saying More or less, more or less ...
          Inside the sheet-white farmhouse the docent, a retired school teacher dressed like a Girl Scout in orthopedic shoes, recites her dates. Afterward, my friends tell me that another, younger guide offered to conduct "a darker tour."
          The kitchen garden, the fruit trees and barn, the ambiguous equipment are a frozen snapshot with placards. They might be the stage of a play, or a diorama. The striving and doubt have been removed, all goals having been achieved.  
          Suddenly I am not alone. Another refugee walks past me, mutters something about the heat, and walks out onto the lawn. He sits on a boulder and faces the woods, then lies down beneath a tree. He can't be 30.
          Frost was 37 when he left this place for Buckinghamshire, U.K. He was born in California. He was about as New England as a taco. Yet how frighteningly perfect, the lines inspired by clouds and cows. What a vortex of determination, picking up any object in its path and using it so deftly. How similar the work of a poet must have been to the work on this farm. 
          I'm sorry I missed the tour.

The Night Robber

          Brushing my teeth naked, in the mirror I see the bruises on my arms. I read them like news, placing my fingers quizzically on the blue-brown spots. I'm Jeremy Brett playing Holmes. What happened here?
          My back hurts, but it cannot tell me why.
          I haven't had an honest eight o'clock since my thirties. Oh, there were the handful of tense nights when I held out—cheerfully manic, determined, then, finally, just jittery and sad. 
          Gone are the nights of painting, or Schumann, or a 10-gallon Dostoevsky. 
          The audio of my nights is lost, too, like a microphone placed too far from the action—the gunshots in Dealey Plaza. Something was said: expostulation, and reply. Shots rang out—were there three, or four?—and I went to bed. Do I remember, or did I just dream?
          In the morning, an umpire raises his fist, but he hasn't enough fingers. I make coffee and await my fate.  

The Electives

          In the final semester of an English major that had seemed nothing but endless afternoon discussions of character, or fate, or motivation, I signed up for two art classes to fill out my hours.
          Literary criticism had refused to tell me how, insisting always on the moral or psychological—upon what. Looking at the syllabus for the painting class, my yearning for technique pounced on the kabbalistic vocabulary of required equipment: cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, Rose madder, Mars yellow, Titanium white, phthalo blue, linseed oil, Dammar varnish, hog hair brushes, gesso. 
          The only familiar thing on the list was Saran wrap, which had to be the inexpensive type that clung to everything.
          The large, dirty studio had the carelessness and potential of an empty stage during rehearsal—windowless, overheated. Bus carts, splattered with paint, idled like robots around the room but the easels were grouped—with something of the ghosts of their previous masters still palpable. 
          The acrid smell of turpentine quickly became a favorite of mine.

February Funeral

          The snow that lay on the fields grew thicker—the left-hand pages of a novel—as we drove north. The highway was a shoelace. The radio was silent.
          A storm was coming from the south, and we just had time to drive up, proceed with the small service, and get home before the juggernaut. The ultramarine was withdrawing from the sky like a refugee. Salt blotched the macadam.
          In town, the funeral home sat aloof from the corner of a busy intersection, its boxy additions and hasty portico all but obscuring a fine old manse somewhere in the center of the expansion. Only the gingerbread dormers were visible, peering out as if above a lid.
          I slipped on invisible ice and—abandoning my fear of people—embraced the opportunity to tell the greeter. She asked me to show her precisely which spot—here? or here?—and we busied ourselves in a lively, polite exchange as I admired her slender, Neiman Marcus triumph over age.
          Thus I delayed going into the room with all the lights. I held back, waiting for Gary to burst like a pierced golf ball, to surrender his civility—his amiable, efficient, sportsmanlike thing—into the arms of someone deeper in his history than me.

Wide Awake at 3:00

          The easy sleep ends like a ferris wheel halts, my legs and back swaying from lost momentum, and the hard sleep begins.
          Working down, and over, I read the numbered clues to the evening's puzzle—nouns I cannot remember. The darkness has obscured the record of my rages (or weeping) like a bad paint job. Gary breathes heavily and easily: he speaks the night's language.
          The cats cross each other running ahead of my flashlight like subway rats.
          Climbing down the narrow book-lined steps, as I descended Sargent Mountain 20 years ago, I reach a hostel stocked with despairing calculation: one candle, one bottle of spring water, aspirin, and sleeping pills. 
          I unfold myself into the bath.
          The room is umber; the tiny flame is orange and red—a steamy Caravaggio, smelling of Calgon. 
          I count down until dawn.