The Narrow Door (11 page)

To have such charisma and control in front of the room! Whenever I teach, I am fighting the oncoming wave. I can’t even sit on the desk in front of them without feeling it on my back, the cold of it, purified from coming across a great distance at sixty miles an hour. If only those students in the chairs knew that I was never in AP English, that I hardly read books in high school, that I once got an F on a pop quiz on
A Raisin in the Sun
because I’d never even cracked the damn thing open, though we’d been talking about the play in class for two weeks.

Still, I like the people in my department. They’re smart, funny. They’re worldly. A motley mix, one is a former dancer, one is the former bass guitarist for a rock band. Even my boss is a former resident of the writers conference in Vermont. I’m sure this is why she hires me, as everyone’s title here implies the word “former.” But they make the former an entertaining place to be. Not that we don’t work hard, excessively hard. There I am, writing end-user notes for Real Property and Mortgages when I’ve never had a home of my own. Most of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. One of these days I’m going to be found out, and it will be worse than any infraction related to the study of English literature.

One day, on a business trip, a prospective banking client asks, is your background in mortgages and notes? I practically weep,
no, Shakespeare!
Oh, Shakespeare: Hamlet would know what to do with a question like that. It helps to set the alarm for five every morning, pull out my legal pad, prop the legal pad on my bent legs, and write in bed for an hour. Sometimes I can’t even read the sloppy penmanship when I get home that night. It looks like the penmanship of someone with a personality disorder. Still, the act of writing gives me permission to do that eight-hour day. It is a ritual, an act of stillness, of saying
here I am
to myself. No, I haven’t joined the ranks of former artists, though my coworkers might not exactly be aware of that. By the end of the year I have put together two stories I’m reasonably proud of, stories about an intense, expressive mother and the disoriented son who wants to take care of her and doesn’t know how to begin. One of these stories centers upon a broken Tilt-A-Whirl ride. The story itself is divided into twelve pieces. By that I mean individual moments in time are separated by white space, and by stumbling on that form, I have found a way to sound a little like me.

But one day, I’ve had enough. Enough of waiting in stalled traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. Enough of behaving myself during a regime change at work, where the new CEO tells us that flextime will soon be a way of the past. No more funny postcards on our cubicle walls, no more torn T-shirts worn on the job. Dress code, work on weekends, abrupt layoffs to keep everyone on their feet. The stock market crash has knocked the company off its feet, and we’ve been made to think we’ve contributed to the mess. At least I have another place to go. At least I’ve already been accepted to two residencies, one in the Berkshires, the other over the border in Upstate New York. When I go in to tell Jean, my cool, sweet boss, she completely understands why I have to leave. She doesn’t make me feel as if I’m letting her or anyone else down. She looks at me as if she’d even like to go along with me. No one wants the ship when the captain is already taking it down.

2010 | 
At some point in the tsunami coverage, I know that the disaster is not going to transpire. Perhaps it has to do with the intensity of the vocabulary: receding, discoloration. Or the tone of it, which is a shade too portentous. Rick Sanchez, for one, is so pissed off with the affable manner of the scientist he’s interviewing that he yells at him. Sanchez waves his hands, demanding his guest not sound so nonchalant. Sanchez has a story he’s responsible for, and he must think he’ll look like a fool if there’s no story to tell.

I’m simply bothered that I’ve organized the afternoon around the event, which has been given an estimated time of arrival, as if a jetliner is coming in to the Hilo Airport. The speed of the wave has been compared to the speed of a jetliner, and perhaps that’s what I find compelling about the phenomenon. But there is that impulse in us that says, come on, wave. Come on. Slop over car and grass and shrub: come on. The inevitable, this
thing
that wants to do us in: we can’t watch the spectacle of it with any distance or detachment. We can’t see that this wave is not about us.

1988 | 
I don’t yet see that living in an unheated chicken coop in the Berkshires might not be the best way to spend a late winter month. Nor do I see that cleaning the bathrooms—including the toilets, with their scum and mysterious splashes—might be fairly low on the rungs of the chore ladder. I’ll take shoving logs into the wood stove in the middle of the night. I’ll take getting down on all fours and scrubbing the bathroom floor; no one could have known it was sky-blue beneath all that gray. But cooking is work for another animal—I’m sorry. I can barely heat up water for Red Zinger tea. And I worry all week until it is my night to help out, and when I do, I prepare the tabouli and the hummus as if I’ve been eating the stuff all my life.

In short, I am happy here. I am happy to wake up to the frost inside the windowpanes every morning. I am happy not to think about the coworkers, parents, or friends I’ve left behind. Happy, happy, happy am I in this place that is really more commune than colony, only ten people here at a time. I am so happy that I wonder if I’ve even called Denise. The single phone booth in the dining hall must be shared by all in the span of an hour. If I do call her, I’ll only talk for five minutes, because someone will inevitably be waiting outside to call her boyfriend or art dealer. It is good for Denise not to have an outlet for her obsessions. Maybe it is good for me, too, though I miss her terribly sometimes, especially on those nights when someone’s said a thoughtless thing. I can just hear her, aghast.
What a stupid thing to say.
And yet the dirty floors, the chicken coop, the woodsy meals—all that has given me permission to be someone else. I work on a very short story that takes me three full days to write. I work on another story about a curmudgeonly developer, Clem Thornton, builder of Walden Ponds (Thoreau Lane, Emerson Road, Margaret Fuller Court). And—an idea catches in my head like a piece of straw to my wool sweater—Clem’s grandson, Red, is attracted to other men. Red is in charge of the story.

I look out the window toward the brushy field, but I’m careful not to look too hard. Today David, a visual artist, is cutting a path. He looks as if he’s done this kind of work forever—see the tightness around his eyes and chin, his grip on the scythe. He is gay, and happily so. It isn’t even an issue with him. It goes without saying that the others expect us to find each other attractive. I think about the paint-spattered black sweatshirt he wears every day, his ponytail (all of two inches), the silver hoop in his right ear. I like his style. I would like to look like him, possess his effortless cool, but he is simply not my type. My type tends toward big, stumbling lugs who don’t have much truck with effortless cool. That’s probably true of his type, too, which might be why we make each other nervous. Our exchanges are full of awkwardness: halting sentences, strained cheerfulness, self-conscious silences. It’s always a relief to be joined by someone else whenever we are attempting to have a conversation in the dining room, or else one of us would have to run away.

I work on my story. For whatever reason, all my worries about gay content fall away. I stop thinking about how readers are going to hear it, whether they’re going to think I’m Red. The story moves along its own rugged spine, and oddly, it’s the plainest thing I’ve ever written. The descriptions aren’t as quirky as my usual descriptions, the tone doesn’t live in the slippery zone between the comic and the serious, and the breaks between sections seem to have disappeared. Everything is fused, written as if it happens at a single moment in time.

One night, late in the residency, I read my story at the group reading that happens once a week. The only way I can read the story is to pretend I’ve been reading and writing such work all my life. And I do that without stumbling or lowering my voice for emphasis even though that might have won me points. I pause after I’m finished. Outside, on the grass, a robin makes that strange song at dusk that sounds more like a death song than a greeting. And then I look up and make sure not to walk away from the podium too fast. For a while, everyone’s quiet; no one knows what to say, how to say it. And then they’re talking, talking too quickly, reaching out to grab my hand, hug me longer than is comfortable, hands on the back of my damp flannel shirt. The women love it in a way that makes me grateful but red hot in the face. David, to my surprise, says kind things, better than kind things. His eyes fill up as he says them. Then he dashes into the dark to his studio out back, where he’ll paint to the Smiths for the rest of the night. But the men, the two Roberts? They don’t say a word, but look at me as if all the doors will open for people like me—and not them. It doesn’t exactly help that the women won’t let me go. Oh, they won’t stop talking, these women, straight or gay, all the women the Roberts have been wanting to sneak off into bed with.

I make eye contact with the Roberts for the rest of the week. They appear to pretend that they’ve never heard any story from me; so be it. I expect so little from anyone that my feelings aren’t hurt.

2010 | 
We submit to our TV screens. In Hawaii, all the schools are closed for the day, all the malls, the banks, the office buildings. Soon the water discolors a bit. The green of it goes a little ashy around the point. We look at the phenomenon the way we once might have looked at the moon when we were children, as if through determined looking we’d see new life in it. But there isn’t anything new here. The water recedes some. And an hour later, the spectators on the hill in Hawaii seem to shrug all at once. They slide their phones in their pockets and purses. They get in their cars, not knowing what to do with their agitation, and drive back to their homes with it.

1988 | 
Denise holds her cup of coffee against her chin. Her eyes are open, but it’s her listening gaze; she’s never looking near me or at me. She’s looking at the space just above the bowl of limes on the dining room table. She’s waiting for adventure, revelation. A truck ticks on the cobblestones outside, engine off, cooling. She lights up a cigarette. I’m reading aloud from the new story, trying not to listen to myself, trying not to take in the fact that I’m not hearing her usual sounds of agreement or surprise. I’ve been thinking about this night ever since I’ve come home from the Berkshires, half with eagerness, half with dread. I do know that life cannot proceed without getting this message out. I am different in my bones and blood, as strange as that may seem, and perhaps the bodily necessity of that helps me on. I’m not as anxious as I would have expected to be. I’d be drowning tonight if I tried to pretend nothing had changed in that month away.

I should be crying, but I am not crying.

I take a sip of water. It helps that the story also feels less like me than ever. The reading at the artist colony helped me to take it one step further from myself, and now it’s already another step further. Me? This story isn’t about me. Perhaps that’s why I can read it at Denise’s long dining room table, in the new town house near the Art Museum, knowing that she’s thinking about Red and Clem and the empty model homes they’re walking by at dusk, the acres ahead of browning fields, unfinished streets.

“Is that you?” Denise says.

The brightness of the lamp on her face. She says it casually, though she mustn’t be feeling so casual inside. I must nod or shrug.

“Well, that was a good way to do it,” she says, friendly.

She smiles. She goes on to talk about what she loves about the story, as she’s always done, taking special pains to treat it as if it’s just any story of mine but better, truer. The lamp is still here, the tree outside the window is still here. The limes on the table, the truck. The heating system kicks on with a mathematical hush, but I feel as if I’ve just finished moving an entire household, a box at a time, up five flights of stairs. Then carried the whole household right back down again.

Can I lie down now? My head hurts, but it would confuse her to let that be known. I should be relieved, but I already know it’s not so simple.

Then we talk about all the usual things, her parents, my parents, the student of hers who’s demanding an A over an A minus. The terrible cover they’re using for her novel. We know the new cover, with its acidic palette, is more likely to attract attention, is livelier than the single sad trumpet of the previous version, but we must convince ourselves we like it every time one of us holds it at some distance across the room. We’re afraid to say it’s not working, afraid to say it’s going to sink the book before it even gets the chance to float, because that just feels like doomsaying and there’s so much to be hopeful for.

A thought must also run through our minds at some point that evening. Why had I waited so long to tell her? What did I lose by keeping myself closed for so long? The costs of bandaging, mummying myself: how long will those costs go on? They couldn’t have been good for us, those costs. They will play out for years, we know it, in ways we’ll never be able to predict. Of course we are already in the new house, the stronger, brighter, more modern house. It’s the house everyone wants to live in. It’s expensive, spacious; light cleans its rooms. But I’m already wondering about the lost house, the eerie permissions of its clutter. The rooms you could never quite make out because it was dark there. You always liked the dark.

Why can’t we ever have two houses at once? Openness, hiddenness, then back again?

But at least this time is better than the last time: my mother’s hysteria, my father’s silence, fuming silence. And the newspaper article left for me at breakfast one morning: GAY CANCER KILLS 100. To sit there, eating my shredded wheat casually, as if the headline, folded in half with such care, were meant to be read by a stranger and not by me, someone who thought he was known and trusted by them.