How to Be Alone (31 page)

Gregg at last looks up from his little monitor. Though visibly dissatisfied with the second take, he announces that a third take won’t be necessary. Chris, the cameraman, grins like a hunting dog whose instincts have been vindicated. He’s wearing jeans and a corduroy shirt; he looks as if he’d listened to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd in his youth. Gregg, for his part, seems like a person to whom the Smiths and New Order were important. As he and I drive west out of the city, I wait for him to ask me questions about St. Louis or to joke with me about the tedium and artificiality of what we’re doing, but he has messages to return on his cell phone. He has an expensive crew, a marginally cooperative actor, and seven hours of daylight left.

TO FREE UP MONDAY
for shooting, I did my socializing on Sunday at the home of my parents’ old next-door neighbors, Glenn and Irene Patton. The Pattons had foreseen better than I the difficulty of visiting too many people sequentially, and they’d called me in New York to offer to host a small reception.

I pulled into my old street, Webster Woods, at three o’clock, approaching the Pattons’ from the direction that didn’t take me past my family’s house. A light rain of no season, neither summer nor fall, was coming down; a gang of crows was cawing in some tree. Although Glenn had recently had both of his knees replaced and Irene had just recovered from a genuine case of shingles, the two Pattons looked happy and healthy when they met me at their door.

Through the windows of their kitchen, where I made ineffectual gestures of helping with refreshments, I could see the back of my old house. Irene spoke warmly of the young couple who lived in it now. She told me what she knew of their lives and of their improvements to the house in the two years since my brothers and I had sold it. Our tiny back yard was now a parking lot for a medium-sized boat and a tremendous SUV. The grass appeared to have been paved over, but I couldn’t tell for sure, because I couldn’t stand to look for more than a second.

“I told them you were coming,” Irene said, “and they said you’re more than welcome to come over and see the house, if you’d like.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“Oh, I know,” Irene said. “Ellie Smith, when I called to invite her for today, said she hadn’t driven down this street since you boys sold the house. She says it’s just too painful for her.”

The Pattons’ doorbell began to ring. We’d invited four other couples who had known my parents well and whom I hadn’t seen since my mother died. There was something of the miracle now in watching them arrive two by two and settle in the Pattons’ carpeted living room, in seeing all of them so alive and so much themselves. They were close to my parents’ age—in their seventies and eighties—and my memories of some of them were as old as my oldest memories of my parents. If you really
get
the death of a person you love, as I had finally and reluctantly
got
the death of my parents, then you know that the first and most fundamental fact of it is that you will never again see the person as a living, smiling, speaking body. This is the mysterious basic substance of the loss. To put my arms around women with whom my mother had played bridge for much of her life, to shake the large hands of men with whom my father had cleared brush or found fault with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was to feel loss and its contrary simultaneously. Any of these couples could have been my parents, still one hundred percent alive, still making light of their ailments, still accepting from Glenn Patton one of his famously well-poured drinks, still loading up small plates with raw vegetables and assorted dessert bars and baked Brie with a sweet tapenade. And yet they weren’t my parents. There was an altered house next door to prove it. There was a boat and a bloatational SUV in the back yard.

By the time the party had ended and I sat down to watch some Rams football in the Pattons’ family room, a big autumn wind was picking up outside, drying the street and lightening the sky. I thought of the last page of
Swann’s Way
: the wind that “wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake.” The great oak trees that helped Marcel “to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses.” And his conclusion: “The reality that I had known no longer existed.”

This was a lesson I’d absorbed long before my mother died. Visiting her at home, I’d been disappointed again and again by the thinness, the unvividness, of rooms that in my memory were steeped in almost magical significance. And now, I thought, I had even less cause to go seeking the past in that house. If my mother wasn’t going to come walking up the driveway in her housecoat with her hands full of the crabgrass she’d pulled or the twigs she’d picked up off the lawn, if she wasn’t going to emerge from the basement with an armload of wet sheets that she’d been waiting to hang on the clothesline once the rain stopped (she’d always liked the smell of sheets that had hung outside), the scene in the Pattons’ windows didn’t interest me. As I sat watching football and listened to the barren wind, I believed that the reason I couldn’t stand to look at my old house was that I was done with it: that I didn’t want to feel the inevitable nothing when I went inside it, I didn’t want to have to blame an innocent house for still existing after its meaning had been emptied out.

BUT THE SHOW MUST GO
on! We shoot four takes of me making a left turn into Webster Woods, Gregg stopping us after each so that he can examine it on his monitor. We do multiple takes of me driving very slowly toward my old house. Over the walkie-talkie one of the men suggests that I look around curiously, as if I haven’t been here in a while. We reshoot the same scene with Chris in the passenger seat, capturing my point of view through the windshield and then wedging himself against the door to capture me looking around curiously, as if I haven’t been here in a while.

By one o’clock, we’re parked at the bottom of the little hill on which my old house sits. The new owners have built a retaining wall across the incline up which I used to struggle to push a lawn mower. The wall is pink—the effect is of a Lego fortress—but maybe there’s a long-term plan to let ivy grow and cover it.

After a moment I have to look away. The sky and sun are brilliant, the local trees still green. Three small kids are playing outside the only new house, an ugly stuccoed box, that’s been built on the street since I lived here. Gregg is asking the children’s mother for permission to film them. I don’t know the mother. I used to know everybody in Webster Woods, but now I only know the Pattons.

For half an hour, while the crew films generic American children romping on generic grass, I sit in the sun on a triangular traffic island across the street from the Pattons. I try not to claw myself where I itch. Behind me is a young oak tree that my family planted after my father died. My father had left no instructions for his burial or cremation—had refused all his life to discuss the matter—and so we decided to plant a tree on this island where he’d cut grass and raked leaves for nearly thirty years. We scattered some of his ashes around the tree and installed a small marble marker engraved
IN MEMORY OF EARL FRANZEN
. I have a feeling that this tree would interest Gregg, and I don’t quite understand my resolve not to tell him about it. Certainly, if I’m protecting my privacy, it’s perverse of me to be annoyed that the crew is lavishing attention on someone else’s children.

After Gregg has run to my car to get a release form for the mother to sign, I am summoned to stroll down the street while Chris, shooting, backs away from me. Gregg asks me to say a few words about Webster Woods, and I deliver a short paean to the place, my happiness in growing up here, my affection for the public schools and the Congregational Church.

Gregg is frowning. “Something more specifically about this neighborhood.”

“Well, obviously, it’s a suburban neighborhood.”

“Something about what kind of people live here.”

My feeling about the people who live here now is that they’re not the people who used to live here, and that I hate them for this. My feeling is that I would die of rage if I had to live on this street where I once lived so happily. My feeling is that this street, my memory of it, is
mine;
and yet I patently own none of it, not even the footage being shot in my name.

So I deliver, for the camera, a brief sociology lecture on how the neighborhood has changed, how the homes have been expanded, how much more money the new families have. The truth content of this lecture is probably near zero. Irene Patton has come out of her house and waves to me from her front yard. I wave back as to a stranger.

“Are you sure we can’t shoot you in front of your house?” Gregg says. “Just in front of it, not inside it?”

“I’m really sorry,” I say, “but I don’t want to.” And then, because I don’t understand what it is that I’m protecting, I have a spasm of regret for being so difficult. I tell Gregg that I’ll give him a picture of the house in the winter with snow on it. “You can show the picture,” I say Gregg tosses his hair back. “And you’ll definitely give us that.”

“Definitely”

But Gregg still seems unhappy with me, and so I find myself offering him the tree. I explain to him about the tree, I tell the story, but the effect isn’t what I hoped for. He seems only mildly interested as I lead the crew back to the triangle and point out the marble marker. Irene Patton is still in her yard, but I don’t even look at her now.

For another half-hour we shoot me and the tree from many angles and distances. I walk slowly toward the tree, I stand in front of the tree contemplatively, I pretend to contemplate the inscription at the base of the tree. The itching on my torso reminds me of the scene in
Alien
where the newly hatched alien erupts through the space traveler’s chest.

Apparently I’m failing to emote.

“You’re looking up at the tree,” Gregg coaches. “You’re thinking about your father.”

My father is dead, and I, too, am feeling dead. I remember and then make myself forget that some of my mother’s ashes were scattered here as well. While Chris zooms and pans, I am mainly registering the configuration of oak twigs on my retina, trying to remember the size of the tree when we planted it, trying to calculate its annual growth rate; but part of me is also watching me. Part of me is imagining how this will play on TV: as schmaltz. Rendering emotion is what I do as a writer, and this tree is my material, and now I’m helping to ruin it. I know I’m ruining it because Gregg is frowning at me the way I might frown at a faulty ballpoint pen. That my belly and back are itching so insanely is almost a relief, because it distracts me from the shame of failing to do justice to my father and his tree. How I wish I hadn’t offered Gregg this tree! But how could I not have offered
something}

I am failing as an Oprah author, and the team and I are finishing up some final strolling footage, well into our third hour in Webster Woods, when I complete the failure. Five words come bursting from my chest like a hideous juvenile alien. I say: “This is so fundamentally bogus!”

Chris, to my surprise, raises his face from his eyepiece and laughs and nods vigorously. “You’re right!” His voice is loud with merriment and something close to anger. “You’re right, it is totally bogus!”

Gregg, stone-faced, merely looks at his watch. Time is short, and the author is being difficult.

FROM WEBSTER WOODS
we drive out through the western reaches of the county to the Museum of Transportation, a glorified track siding to which railroads have delivered obsolete rolling stock, perhaps taking charitable tax deductions for their trouble. I have no particular fascination with trains and I’ve never been to the museum, but a transportation museum makes a cameo in
The Corrections
, and one of the novel’s main characters is a railroad man. So my job is to stand or walk near trains and look contemplative. I do this for an hour.

When it’s time for me to leave for the bookstore where I’m reading and signing tonight, I shake Gregg’s hand and say I hope he got some footage he can use. In the gloom of his reply I recognize a fellow perfectionist and worrier, whose retakes are the equivalent of my rewrites.

“I guess I’ll find some way to make it work,” he says. Borders Bookstore in Brentwood is crowded when I arrive. One of my publisher’s publicists, a St. Louis native named Pete Miller, has flown in and has brought to the reading his sister, his girlfriend, and a bottle of single-malt Scotch for me to drink on my tour. Seeing him now, after a day with strangers, I feel among family again. It’s not simply that I’ve worked with the same smallish publisher for fourteen years, or that Pete and his colleagues feel more like friends than like business associates. It’s that Pete and his girlfriend have just come from New York and New York is the city, of all the cities in the world, that feels to me like the home I grew up in. My parents had me late in life, and my most typical experience as a child was to be left to my own devices while adults went to work and had parties. That’s what my New York is.

Homesick, I nearly throw my arms around Pete. Only after I’ve given my reading does the full scope of my connection to this other home, this St. Louis, become apparent. In the signing line are scores of acquaintances—former classmates, parents of my friends, friends of my parents, Sunday school teachers, fellow actors in school plays, teachers from high school, coworkers of my father’s, bridge partners of my mother’s, people from church, near and distant old neighbors from Webster Woods. The new owner of my family’s house, the man I’ve been hating all day, has driven over to greet me and to give me a relic from the house: a brass door knocker with my family’s name on it. I take the knocker and shake his hand. I shake everybody’s hand and drink the Scotch that Pete has poured me. I soak up the good will of people who demand nothing from me, who’ve simply stopped by to say hello, maybe get a book signed, for old times’ sake.