None of this Ever Really Happened (25 page)

"Was saving the woman another?" He hadn't spoken of
her directly before. "Is this compensation?"

"It might have been. I've thought about that, but it doesn't
really change things. What mattered was that the doctor be
stopped, so I got a gun. Actually, I got two guns because I
went back and forth on whether I would shoot him from a
distance or at close range. I got a rifle and a pistol. I found a
shooting range. I began to develop my skills as a marksman.
I became quite good, actually.

"Then I developed a plan." I described my plan in what
might have been excruciating detail for Decarre. How I'd located
his house on a wooded North Shore ravine near Lake
Michigan. How I'd found a perfect place to conceal myself in
his neighbor's bushes and yew trees. How I'd been stymied for
some time about how to get there and get away because there's
no street parking in the neighborhood and the area is heavily
patrolled, but how I'd hit on the solution one night waiting
for the train when a pack of bikers went by, and I realized that
they did not arouse suspicion, they were anonymous and they
were quick to disappear into the night on a bike path that ran
below ground level and under cross streets most of the way to
Evanston. I told him how I'd become a biker, ridden the route
a dozen times, timed it, sat in the bushes, watched Decarre
and his family, measured their routines and schedules, pulled
an imaginary trigger, left an imaginary rifle in the bushes
a la Lee Harvey Oswald, ridden away, a minute and a half
to the bike trail, twenty-two to Evanston. I said all of this
confidentially, as if Decarre were in on the plan, as if he were a
coconspirator. By this point in the process his discomfort was
evident, and I found myself relishing it.

I continued. "Then one night the gun was real. It was
the middle of October. The nights were chilly, the leaves had
turned and were starting to fall, and when they had fallen,
my cover would be gone. I was running out of time. I knew
I had to act. This was the night. I waited and waited. Finally
the doctor came out onto this porch, this conservatory they
have, all glass, at 9:17. He had a phone in one hand talking
on it, a glass of red wine in the other; he sat down on
the couch with his back to the window. He sat down and he
stayed there. Very cooperative. I fixed his head in my sights.
I imagined firing the gun, the glass shattering, the doctor
disappearing from view except for a pink spray, a splatter of
blood and brain on the wall opposite. I drew a bead on him,
and I held it. I held it a long time, but I couldn't shoot him.
I just couldn't do it. Finally I put the gun down, took it apart,
put it back in the tennis-racket cover I'd brought it in. I just
sat there a long time having a talk with myself. It was a soul-searching
talk. It was epiphanic. I said to myself, 'Who are
you kidding? You're no killer. You can't shoot this guy. You're
never going to shoot this guy. You're no killer. You're no cop.
You're no private eye. This is all silly.' On my bike ride home,
I asked myself the question, 'If you are not those things, then
just who are you? Well,' I said to myself, 'I'm a teacher, for
one thing. A pretty good teacher, and I'm a writer, and I'm
a storyteller.' And then it came to me. That was the answer.
I would tell our story. I would tell our story: my story, your
story, Lisa Kim's story, the whole thing." Then I picked up my
backpack and held it on my lap.

"And that's what I've done. I've told it. I've written it. It
has taken me a long time to do. I actually took a sabbatical to
work on it. I spent most of it in a little house in Mexico. I lost
one lover and found another. Lots of things changed. My
whole life changed, but I did it. I wrote it. Then I sent it out
blindly to twenty-five literary agents and one of them, Lorin
Rees up in Boston, read it and liked it, and he took it around,
and you know what? He found a publisher for it. Tina Pohlman
at Harcourt bought it, believe it or not, and you know
what else? It was released today. It went on sale this morning
all over the country. I stopped in the Lake Forest Book
Store on my way here, and there's a whole stack of them sitting
right there. Same at Borders. Same at Barnes and Noble.
And there's a good chance it's going to be reviewed in the
Tribune
this week if you care to look for it."

Then I unzipped my backpack, took out the book, and
put it on the coffee table between us. "And here it is." I turned
it 180 degrees so he could read the title. "
Travel Writing.
It's
kind of a metaphor. There's a disclaimer, you know the kind,
but you'll recognize yourself. Everyone else will recognize
you, too." I let him look at it a moment longer; then I flipped
open the cover with my index finger. "See, I inscribed it: 'For
Lisa.' And see, here it is again in the dedication: 'For Lisa.'"

He stared unblinking at the book, then said almost as if
to himself, "None of this really happened."

"Sure it did," I said. "Most of it did. I changed the order
of things; rearranged some things, but you and I both know
most of these things really happened."

"Not this conversation," he said.

"Well—"

"How can this conversation be in your book if it's taking
place right now?"

"Listen—"

"It never happened, and it never will happen."

"You're right that it hasn't happened, but not that it never
will. In some form it's going to happen, and probably in this
office."

"But you can't get away with this," he said a bit plaintively.
"It's all fabrication."

"No, no. It's not. I
am
going to tell you what I finally have
to say. You may hear two minutes of it and throw me out on
my ear, or you may hear it all and jab me with a syringe, or
you may just read it, but I am going to say this stuff to you
one way or another."

"It's slander. That's what it is."

"How much of it you hear and when you hear it I can't
control, but it doesn't really matter if you hear it. I mean,
the book's in the stores. Whether you hear it or not, you're
fucked."

"This is clear-cut libel," he said a little dazed.

"This whole chapter is just for the reader, anyway," I said.
"It's a literary device. It's just for the sake of the story. It's Hercule
Poirot calling everyone together in the drawing room,
you know, or Inspector Morse explaining everything to Sergeant
Lewis over a pint of real ale. It's completely unnecessary
and—"

"It never happened," he repeated.

"Of course it didn't. That's what we're both saying, isn't
it? This part of it never happened. No one is pretending that
it did."

"No one's going to believe you, anyway," he said.

"Someone already did. The publisher."

"I'll sue your publisher into bankruptcy," he said, but
without much conviction.

"Will you?"

"And I'll sue you for every penny you're worth."

I said, "I think you have to."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't think you have any choice. After all, what if you
don't? It will be pretty much an admission of guilt, wouldn't
you say?"

"I'll sue you," he said a bit pathetically. "I'll sue you."

"I hope so. You see, apparently we don't have a very strong
criminal case, but in a civil court, where the burden of proof
is 'preponderance of evidence' and 'reasonable doubt' doesn't
apply, we'd win hands down. Then maybe criminal charges
can be preferred; who knows what new evidence will come
to the fore in a civil case?"

"Like what?" he asked.

"Like this, for instance." I took an envelope from my
backpack and held it for him to see. "You know what this is?
It's Tanya Kim's sealed, signed, and notarized affidavit."

"
Tanya
Kim?"

"That's right, Tanya Kim. Unfortunately, it can't be unsealed
except in the event of her death or disability; then it's
to be turned over to the state's attorney. But that's for now.
She can change her mind; young people often do. She might
decide to release this information after she hears the results
of the civil case. Wouldn't surprise me at all."

"Do you have any idea how much a lawsuit costs? How
are you going to pay for all of this?"

"We intend to sell a few books," I said. "But not this one.
This one is complimentary. It's for you." I smiled at him. I
zipped my backpack, gathered my jacket, and then stopped
in the doorway. "I almost forgot. I believe this was intended
for you, too." Then I took Lisa's letter from my hip pocket
where I had carried it right between my wallet and me since
the day I'd been given it. Time and friction had worn it as
smooth and thin as fine silk or polished cotton. I put it on the
coffee table beside the book.

"So what happened?" asks Nick.

"What do you mean, 'what happened?'"

"To the guy. The doctor."

"I told you what happened," I say.

"But afterward. Since then. Did he threaten you? Did he
run away to Brazil or jump off a bridge or what?" asks the girl
whose hair is purple this day.

"There is no 'since then.' I've told you all I know."

"Wait a minute. This is only a story, isn't it?" asks the dog-faced
boy.

"It's not only a story," I say, "but it
is
a story."

"I mean, you're just making it up, aren't you?"

"I'm not just making it up, but I
am
making it up," I say.

"What exactly does that mean?" says the dog-faced boy.
"Your coyness is driving me nuts. I want to know what part
of this was true. Was there a girl in a car?"

"Yes."

"Was she drunk?"

"Yes."

"Did she crash her car?"

"She did, and I might have been able to stop her, and I
was the first one there, and she did change my life, and I did
take a sabbatical to write her story."

"You can't just leave it there," says the girl whose hair is
purple. "You gotta make the doctor do something."

"No I don't, but I imagine he'll do something."

"Like off himself? Put a bullet through his head?"

"I hope not," I say.

"Do you? Are you sure?" asks Nick. "Don't you want him
to die? Don't you want to cause him to die? And how, then,
are you different than the doctor wanting Lisa Kim to die?"

"You know, Nick," I say, "you have an uncanny way of hitting
the nail on the head. I
do
feel responsible for what happens.
That's the trouble with this whole moral-indignation
business. Sooner or later you've got to pay the piper. Sooner
or later you have to decide if you're really moral or just indignant.
It's a lot easier to just be indignant, and I found out that
that was most of it for me, but not quite all of it. I also found
out that if you're going to call someone else on his morality,
you'd better be pretty comfortable with your own."

"And are you?" asks Nick.

"Not comfortable enough," I say. "I've got some work
to do."

"But you went ahead anyway," says Nick.

"Yes, I went ahead anyway."

"But where's it go? What's happening in the story right
now?" asks the dog-faced boy.

"Well," I say, "I'm sitting here talking to you."

"This is part of the story?"

"It can be."

"You mean we're in the story?"

"If you want to be," I say.

"
I
want to be," says the purple-haired girl.

"Not me," says someone else.

"Cool!" says the dog-faced boy.

"Wait a minute," says Nick. "Does this mean that
that
moment
and
this
moment are the same? That the two moments
have come together? Like, is the narration now in present
tense?"

"Not necessarily," I say.

"Then there's more to tell," says Nick.

"Only if I choose to tell it," I say.

"What do you mean, if you choose to?"

"That's selection," I say, "and selection is what art is, if
you want to call this art. Hemingway said that what you leave
out is more important than what you put in."

"So what else are you going to put in?" asks the purple-haired
girl.

"Nothing," I say. "I think I've said enough."

"What about Lisa Kim? Are you really done with her?"

"I am."

"And is there really a Lydia?" the purple-haired girl
goes on.

"No."

"Is there a Carolyn?" she asks.

"Yes."

"Are you seeing Carolyn?"

"Yes."

"What's going to happen there?" asks Nick.

"Don't know. Let's just say we've passed the critical trial
period, and we're on an upward trajectory."

"What does that mean?" asks the dog-faced boy.

"They're in love, you dope," says the purple-haired girl.

C
AROLYN WILL SAY
it best: "I don't much care where
we go, but when we get there, I want to unpack my
things and put them in drawers. I want to stay put."

We will have both done the grand tour, bought Eurail-passes,
seen seven cities in six days, lugged backpacks, and
stood in lines at Internet cafés wondering if there are any
Parisians
left in Paris. We will have seen London, we will
have seen France. Now it will be time to sit somewhere in our
underpants with a glass of something and a good book. Besides,
it will be our honeymoon.

We will choose Rose Cottage in the village of Doolin in
the County of Clare in the West of Ireland. We will find it in
the
Self Catering Guide
put out by the Irish Tourist Board.

The great advantage of renting a house is that almost immediately
you begin to live there in a way you never do in a
hotel room; you buy flowers because you know you're going
to outlast them; you concern yourself with toilet paper and
bathtub rings; you rearrange the furniture; you stock the
fridge.

You become, however briefly, a member of a nontransient
community and, as is always the case when you live in a
place, your ultimate impression is much different than your
initial one.

That will be good in the case of Rose Cottage. Actually
our
very
first impression will be quite positive. When we'll
turn into the yard just off the high road to the Cliffs of Moher,
we'll be a little thrilled. A hundred-year-old house on a
working farm, Rose Cottage will have a high, peaked roof
of thatching, three-foot-thick whitewashed walls, bright blue
shutters, and window boxes of colorful impatiens.

But the thick walls and small windows will make the
common room dark, the beds will sag, the kitchen will be
somewhere between utilitarian and drab, and the only view
of the rolling green land, blue sea, and Aran Islands to the
west will be from the bathroom because a large metal barn
completely lacking in the kind of charm Americans go to Europe
for will block all other windows.

The place will have been thrown wide open all lights
ablaze, radio blaring, and peat burning in the fireplace. We
will poke about trying not to be disappointed. "Bedrooms are
cute," we'll say. "It's got a shower."

Suddenly Breda Logan will dash in out of the drizzle
wiping her hands on her apron. "Raining," she'll say. "Now
here's this and here's that. Blankets in the cupboard, and I've
brought you a load of peat for the fire. More behind the barn
if you need it. No time to chat you up right now. Cakes in me
oven. Back soon." It will be the last we'll see of her until the
very hour of our departure two weeks later.

"Before you go, could you show us where Doolin is?"

"Well, just there," she'll say with a broad wave of her arm
as we cross the yard toward the pasture.

"Where?"

"Just there," she'll say, a tiny bit frustrated, but all we'll see
will be a scattering of farmhouses along a road far below us,
nothing that resembles a village much less a town, certainly
not the traditional music capital of all Ireland.

But it will be Doolin, okay, although when we'll get up
close we'll find some more of it hidden beneath the lip of the
hill. Still, it won't be much: one pub and a handful of shops
at one end of the road, two more and a few houses half a
mile away at the other, a few B&Bs and a small hotel or two
in between, a tiny yellow church just recently built on a bare
hilltop, looking as if it belongs in Montana.

We'll walk the road for an hour and then pass campgrounds
on our way down to the water's edge. We'll have a
pint and some okay fish chowder in one of the pubs and listen
to some music that won't be as good as the townie band
we'll have heard in Clifton the night before. We'll give up and
go home to bed.

The morning forecast will be for brighter weather, but it
will still be wet and cool when we get up. Fourth of July mass
and we'll stand at the back with several ruddy-faced, fidgety
men looking the worse for last night's wear. The priest's
homily will be about being nice to Americans; "Hardly a
soul in Doolin doesn't have someone in the States, I should
think."

Outside a car will stop and an Italian man will ask directions
in broken English, and I will start to say I don't know,
but then I'll realize that I do. He'll have asked about the one
place whose location I'll happen to know. Left at the corner,
two kilometers, left at the police station, straight on.

We'll sack two tiny grocery stores in nearby Lisdoonvarna
for picnic stuff and makings for a dinner Carolyn will want to
cook, and by noon there will be a bowl of fruit on the kitchen
table, fresh-cut flowers on the mantel, and tunes in the air.

I will find a mackintosh hanging in the hallway and some
wellies and set about cleaning and moving some lawn furniture
I'll find down behind the barn to an open space where
our glasses will be able to sit on the stone wall, our feet to
rest on the pasture gate, and we to look over the backs of the
cows through the fog to where the sea and Aran Isles will
be alleged to be. Coming back around I will be surprised to
see a tour bus stopped in the road and lots of Japanese faces
behind Japanese cameras taking lots of pictures. Most of the
cameras will be aimed at Rose Cottage, but as the bus will
slowly move away, a couple will swivel to snap me. I'll tip
my cap and try to think of something Pat O'Brien-ish to say.
One day we'll be strangers in a strange land; the next we'll
damn near be natives.

By noon we'll be off on the five-mile hike to the dramatic
Cliffs of Moher that fall away a thousand feet into the sea.
We'll have lunch in our backpack and hope in our hearts that
the drizzle will be just a heavy mist. At first we'll walk farmers'
lanes for some time just one step ahead of a herd of cows
being moved from pasture to pasture by some farm boys,
but halfway there we'll find ourselves back on the main road
alongside fast cars and fumey tour buses.

Then it will rain. We'll seek shelter in an animal pen beside
the road and as we'll wait out the shower, we'll watch a
couple coming down through the fields from what will look
like the cliffs. When they reach us, we'll ask if we'll be able to
get to the visitor center that way.

"Yes, but don't go. There are fifty thousand people there.
Just climb up the path a bit for the best view of the cliffs." Half
an hour later, we'll be having Stilton cheese, crusty bread,
ham, apples, and wine, practically dangling our feet over the
cliff. The sun will be out and strong and we'll be down to our
T-shirts.

Will there ever be a lovelier place or moment in the
world? We'll laugh aloud. We'll sing John Prine's lyric: "Half
an inch of water and you think you're going to drown, that's
the way that the world goes round."

We'll watch a lone hiker coming up the cliff path from
Doolin and offer him a glass of wine when he gets to us. Yes,
you can come all the way, he'll assure us, so we'll go all the way
back to town climbing over stone walls and holding barbed
wire apart for each other, turning often for head-shaking
views of the cliffs. In five miles we'll meet just six people.

Then I'll be back at Rose Cottage sitting with my feet on
the gate, and the Aran Islands will have magically appeared
one after another in the bright blue world beyond me. I'll be
able to hear Carolyn's clatter and music in the kitchen, and
soon she'll join me for a pint of Guinness and the sunset.
Afterward we'll build a peat fire and eat Carolyn's wonderful
chicken, ham, and leek pie in front of it. Very Irish. It is always
nice to make a small home in a far place.

Ten days later, we'll take the hour-long ferry ride to Inishmore,
the largest and most distant of the Aran Islands, last
refuge of Celtic culture and the very edge of Europe, next
stop Boston. We'll spend the day riding bikes through the
endless labyrinth of stone-walled farm lanes, chatting with
students at an archeological dig, crawling on our bellies to
the edge of a three hundred–foot drop at the fortress called
Dun Aengus, which dates to 2000
B.C.
, overhearing schoolboys
in uniform arguing in Gaelic.

Then we'll be having pints and sandwiches at a picnic table
in a sunny beer garden at the top of the village when Jon
and Cynthia Lynch will come along. "Mind?"

"Not at all." They will have just arrived and be poring over
their guidebooks.

"Do you know if you can rent bikes in Doolin?" they'll
ask.

"Yes," we'll say, "there are two places right in the main
road."

"And where do you ride?"

We'll tell them about the coastal road that we'll have ridden
to a manor house cum hotel called Aran View House,
and the good dinner we'll have eaten there. We'll tell them
about riding back away from the sea into the rocky landscape
called the Burren, about the fifteenth-century, five-story-tall
shell of a castle called Lemeneagh that we'll have trespassed
on a working farm to tour because there'll be no one around
to guide us or even charge us a fee, and about the ruined
village that surrounds it outlined in tumbled-down stone
walls; we'll tell them about Carron Church, another fifteenth-century
ruin, very quiet and just sitting in someone's field.
And Portal Dolmen, a tiny stone shelter 3,500 years old, the
oldest constructed habitation known on earth, where a farmer
sitting in his car will have taken a donation in a plastic bucket
and then disappeared, we'll imagine, to the nearest pub.

"Is the hotel the best restaurant?"

We'll say that we liked Branoch na n Aille, an old stone
house right in the village, with plank floors, plain furniture,
and wonderful food.

"How about the pubs?"

"McGann's has a good feel and good food," Carolyn will
say, "but the music seemed a bit more casual. We heard the
best musicians at McDermotts, but we ate wonderful mussels
outside at a picnic table at McGann's."

Back on the mainland we'll read books on the grassy
banks above the little harbor, then walk the two miles back
to Rose Cottage for the last time, drink a Guinnesss with the
last sunset, our feet on the pasture gate, cook a last meal of
Guinness stew full of meat, carrots, and prunes, warm ourselves
at our last peat fire.

In the morning we'll be packed and ready when Tom
and Breda Logan will bound into our living room like vaudevillians
onto a stage. They'll clap and laugh and bluster. "And
it's been a fine holiday now, has it?" she'll say.

"I should say. Been going by on me tractor, and those
bedroom curtains are always drawn."

"So it's your honeymoon, then, is it?" she'll say.

"And not his first from the look of him, I shouldn't think,"
he'll say.

I'll laugh.

"Only married four years meself. Bachelor all me days till
the age of forty, then I met Breda here and—"

"Wham!" she'll say. "Nothing but bliss since." They'll eye
each other, laugh in unison, and slap their thighs.

"Grew up in this house, lived here, and farmed the land
till Breda says, 'Let's build the new one cross the way and let
this one to holidayers.'"

"But you still farm the land?" Carolyn will ask.

"I do, and in the fields sixteen hours a day this time
of year."

"And what do you do in the States?" Breda will ask.

"I'm an attorney," Carolyn will say.

"I'm a teacher," I'll say, "and a writer. I write travel
stories."

"Oh, really? For newspapers, then? And what do you
write about?"

"Oh, just the places we go, the people we meet."

"Local color and all of that?" he'll say. "So are you going
to write about Doolin?"

"I think I might," I'll say.

"Now, don't be putting us in there as your local color,"
she'll say.

"Okay, I won't."

"Or if you do," he'll say, "don't be telling the truth."