The Narrow Door (12 page)

I wouldn’t want to live through that ever again. I won’t have to live through that ever again. Denise and I will sit around the table. We will talk more about the new cover of the novel and try to get used to it. A piece of hair falls over her eyes, and then a shadow. I never wanted to be closed to the ones I loved. I wanted to be generous, transparent, available. I fear that I’ve failed her, but there’s also been a beginning. In a little while, it will take a little less work to walk across the room, to hold up that book cover when she asks to see it one more time.

2010 | 
Grief is over. By which I mean that tendency to see endings written in the things themselves: plants, houses, animals, trees, faces. That capacity to think of any face and imagine the stages of its aging, the rings beneath the eyes, the sag above and to the side. Not just its aging, but its absence. A shock in the chest every time any face is conjured up, the little girl playing with a garden hose outside the farm market, the horse running around the track, eyes alert, in the prime of his form. It wasn’t exactly awful, that place. Perhaps it was beautiful to think of the loss of the body, any body, ten times an hour. Though we certainly couldn’t live in that place month after month. We would exhaust ourselves, the brain turning to pencil shavings, or worse.

Grief is over; I tell myself that. It is over. I’m even tempted to say it aloud, as a charm, a dare, even if I know I might be bringing about disaster by doing such a thing. Six months after the loss of my friend, and life is a ruthless, acid thing. It can never get enough. It can never fill its mouth, its gullet. And just when you think all is balance and equipoise (see my straight posture, my neutral face? There I am, halfway across the balance beam), a hand from nowhere pushes against your back. You think you’ve already endured your test, just when it might only be beginning.

From “The Kitchen Table: An Honest Orgy,” Denise Gess (2007)

We examined [the table] again. It was pockmarked and scratched, and initials had been carved into it. Who were “D.H.” and “C.A.”? What boldness or recklessness had led them to make their marks here rather than on the trunk of a tree? As I ran my hand along its surface, I was delighted to discover a smooth depression in the left corner; the palm of my hand slipped snugly into that worn section, where, I decided, many other hands must have rested, gripped, slammed, and pounded the surface while negotiating the everyday struggles of family life. Surely it would serve us as well, humble us with its simplicity, and provide the setting for forming connections. This would be the table at which I could keep an eye on my daughter and stay in touch with her and her friends. This would be the table where B (who claimed to need and love and miss sitting in the kitchen) would linger with me in the mornings before going off to work, and where we’d find each other again late at night to talk. And, given its general appearance and long history, I had faith that any human accident—spilled juice, a hot dish that might leave a mark, a harsh word spoken carelessly—would be forgiven here.

1988 | 
I am sitting around the table on the fourth floor of EPB, the English Philosophy Building, where I am a student in T. C. Boyle’s workshop. I have been in Iowa City for all of two weeks. The voices around me dart and shatter. Perhaps I’m too busy shaping what I’m trying to say—it’s never more than ten words at a time—to take in any of it. When I do find the courage to speak, I feel the pressure building inside me, the faces turning toward me. They’re not used to hearing my voice, not in workshop, at least, so when I do talk, it seems to count for more than it should. After I have spoken, I’m dizzy and a little sick. I have completed my self-assignment. And
then
I can take in the words around me:
this ending is skirting manipulation, this story would benefit from a more expert attention to pacing.
Such intensity around me, in me, even when no one’s talking about my work. Sometimes I wonder whether the brains beside me are going to catch on fire. The words are wielded as if by a soldering iron, both hurting and fixing the story in front of us, even though the words are often kinder, more enthusiastic than anyone would have expected.

I wonder if Denise would think that. I wonder if she would have put her application to the program in the mail, ten years back, if she’d had any glimmer of its atmosphere. In order to be in this program, I’ve had to forget how much she’d wanted it once. I’ve had to tell myself my being here does not mean her not being here. That is true, of course, but I’m not sure whether she thinks that sometimes. How do I know? Just a tone in the voice, a snag in the sentence. It hurts me to hear it, but I never let that in until long after I hang up the phone. And I never talk to her about it. I think it would tear open a chasm, and I’m afraid the words would never stop coming. The words would be too hot to hear, searing me with too much wanting, the kind of wanting that could only do damage.

Is Denise getting more and more competitive with me? It’s funny that I still don’t allow myself to think of that word, as if it’s beneath us, the dirtiest word in our lexicon. I need to hold on to the belief that our love for each other comes first.

In spite of these worries, I do feel curiously awake and alive, not quite a thousand miles west of home, west of the ocean. Sometimes I convince myself I actually like the grain silos, the strip malls in town, the clouds growing gray on a humid day, the treacherous ice storms. Sometimes I feel so alive that I must lie down on the blue wall-to-wall carpet of my apartment and stare up at the granulated spray ceiling until I can feel the heat coming back into my toes and forehead. In an hour I will be driving with my friend Katrina to the Amana Colonies, where we will eat fried chicken, rolls, cole slaw—or more likely, Katrina will watch me eating. It seems to us that there are about ten places to visit within fifty miles of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, and we’ve gone to every single one of them twice within our first few weeks.

Thank God for Katrina. Since the first day of the workshop we’ve been inseparable. She is piercingly intelligent, funny, a graduate of Harvard, a brilliant poet. We go to Econofoods together, we go to the downtown ped mall together. With her dramatic mane of thick hair, half blond, half dark, she is a lioness. She is the kind of young woman that the camera would linger on in a party scene in Fellini’s 8 1/2. She has a beauty mark. All the men are crazy about her; a few of the women are, too. She knows about my sexuality from the get-go, and thus the whole drama of disclosure and hiddenness does not cloud who we are for each other. We can concentrate on what we really need to do, which is to fret about the lack of sexy men in town and dance at the 620, the gay bar on the other side of the railroad tracks, every Saturday night. We are practically married in all ways but one, which is likely confusing to those outside our unit. We even have our own names for each other: I call her Helen, she calls me Troy. She’s even written a poem, a great poem, about an imaginary baby, “Troy’s Baby.”

Is this the beginning of the end of my attachment to Denise? It is a fiery question. When I tell her about workshop parties on the phone, I probably take on the voice of an insider, of someone who’s no longer in awe of this strange new world he’s found himself in. When I talk about
this
visiting writer, my voice might take on the bored detachment of my most skeptical peers, who look up at the ceiling each time a well-established middle-aged writer takes to the stage to read from his latest volume of middle-aged work. Who knows what Denise thinks when she puts the phone down? Does the content of our conversations keep her up at night? Does she hear the name Katrina one more time than she can bear? Is she too jealous to let it out? Maybe she calls DyAnne or Lisa or any one of her friends, and they shake their heads and talk about the fact that I used to be a decent fellow—the old story, another person corroded by ambition, by his proximity to an in-crowd. Years later, Denise will actually say that I was impossible then, and it will scorch me. I want to say, do you know what it was like to be under such scrutiny? Do you know what it was like to feel the earth shifting beneath your feet, week by week, depending on the story you put up? It was so stressful. Don’t simplify me! I’m more complicated than that! You, me—we’re both more complicated. Where is your dignity? But instead I steer the conversation right over that seam in the sidewalk, and once again we are talking about the person we’ve been talking about, some writer whose desperate urge to be seen and known might be eating up her soul, leading her to do things she probably really doesn’t want to do.

It seems odd that Denise and I might be coming apart just as I’ve allowed myself to be closer to her. I am certain this is not my doing, even as I am certain that Katrina is beginning to take Denise’s place in my imagination. The shock is that the shift has happened in months. So quick, so clean. And yet I must feel awful for leaving behind the friend who once meant everything. The feeling is so deep in me that I can’t even look at it, talk about it. If guilt had a form, it would be as thick as sludge: cold, white, spoiled, like the guts of an animal.

One day I’m inside the town bookstore with Katrina and my buddy, Chris. I watch Chris pick up Denise’s book from the display. It must have arrived just now; I certainly hadn’t seen it when we were in the store a few hours ago.

“Look at this,” Chris says, with a little sass in his grin.

He opens the book. He gestures to the inner sleeve, the description that talks about Emily and Lizzie and the playwright who’s come to live with them, their tenant. He points out the playwright’s name. “Eugene Lisicky,” Chris says, as if I’ve been keeping a secret all along. And maybe I have been keeping a secret, even though it’s not the kind of thing you’d tell people. My friend used my last name for a character’s name: for some reason, I am feeling a little embarrassed. Maybe I should have talked Denise out of that. It’s distracting; already Chris is distracted. It’s not fair to the book, which deserves not to be tied down to the names of actual people.

But maybe I’m so used to hearing judgment these days that I’m missing the awe and delight in Chris’s voice. The blush goes up from my neck, my gaze falls. I smile a little. I lift my head again. A flash of pride warms my ears, my face. Then we talk about Tuesday’s workshop, as Chris holds the book, shifting its weight from left hand to right. He puts it under his arm, then puts it back down on the table when it’s time for him to get a bite to eat.

Katrina and I say hi to KK, who comes through the door. We say hi to Brighde, Robin, Steve, Bruce, Fritz, Nicole, Stephen, Gregor, and Elizabeth, who is wearing a particularly fetching shade of dark-red lipstick today. Elizabeth and I will become the dearest friends in the future, though we couldn’t possibly know that yet. We’re all standing in a clump now, but I don’t stop looking at the book out of the corner of my eye. Another workshoppish type nears it; his eye hovers just to the right of it. And just when I think he’s going to pick it up, he reaches for a different book, a book of subtler colors, and reads it deeply as if raw truth were alchemized on its pages. Denise’s book still has the cover we were trying to get used to in the spring. And, no, it isn’t right. I can see now for the first time, it isn’t right. No one is ever going to pick that up. Even the book itself seems to be resisting its jacket, but that’s true of all the books to the right and left of it. So many books, not enough people to read them, not even in Iowa City, the center of writing and reading, where even the fucking bus driver was once a Teaching-Writing Fellow. And the book that had loomed so large for years, the book I cared about as much as my own book? It will be sent back to the warehouse for grinding in six months. I’m still too green to imagine the pain of seeing any of my own books treated like that.

Perhaps what we love about a friendship is that it makes us look over our shoulders, stay on our toes. We watch our words. There are never any rules to guide us, no contracts, no bloodlines, just the day after day of it. It’s work, though it pretends it’s painless and easy. And beneath everything: the queasy possibility that it all might end tomorrow.

Maybe your duty is to have a face-to-face with your friend. You need to say, look, what you said last night hurt. It kept me awake all night. I couldn’t stop playing back the whole conversation, even after the sun came up. Maybe you didn’t mean to say that you liked me best when I was crying out on the pier after I was dumped, but I didn’t like it, oh, not one bit.

As for what that friend might want? Maybe she wants you to push back. Maybe she doesn’t want you to do your usual, which is to skip ahead and edit out the parts you don’t like. She wants you to be wholly inside the movie in order to feel close once more. To see her anew. To live in uncertainty, even if it takes everything in you not to slip out the door.

I think of the high school kids who say, “We think exactly alike.” We like the same music, the same movies and books. And that beach? You like that, too? I thought I was the only one who knew that beach. How much of our initial attraction is based on that kind of thing? The desire for a twin, the need to hear an echo, but perfected. A conversation with oneself: that’s it. A mirror, but with another haircut.

Well, what could be more doomed than that?

Losing a lover: you don’t need to be told how hard it is. It’s all you want to talk about, weep about. Friends get on your side. They say, I never liked him anyway. They tell you everything that was wrong with him: his need to be the center of attention, his judgments, his capacity to bend the truth.

But you feel alive in your weeping. You weep and weep until you’re cleansed by it, stronger for it. You feel as if all the salt in you is gone. All the oil and fat, the denial. After some weeks’ time, you feel lean, all planes and bone, and you think, so that’s what that weight had been about all about. I hadn’t been happy in years. I’d been anchoring myself, soaking up water like a piece of old rope. Then in three years you’re sitting across the table from someone else, beginning all over again.