The Narrow Door (15 page)

The realization of that is enough to stop my breath.

Does a realization stop breath? Of course it can. Not complete breathing, but the pattern. Perhaps there’s relief in breaking the pattern, for how else would you know you have a body, a body to lose?

Maybe Denise knew I’d already had all I could take on my mind.

2010 | 
Reporters seem to know exactly how to piss off Joni Mitchell. Ask a provocative question, call her a
female
singer-songwriter, a folk singer, imply that her foray into jazz was a failed experiment. Talk about her career as if her best songs were “Free Man in Paris” and “Help Me,” songs written and performed in the 1970s. Ask her opinion of the younger songwriters who claim her as an influence, singers who have as much in common with her as plastic does with mahogany. It is so easy to get her going: watch her face get stony, listen to her voice get hard. It must be part of the assignment: Ask her anything you want, but you must ask this offensive thing. Ask this, and the article will be posted and retweeted all over the world.

Which is true of the article I’m looking at today, in which she calls Bob Dylan a plagiarist. She loves Bob Dylan; she’s indebted to him for the long lines in
Hejira
and
Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter
, but the interviewer likely hasn’t done his homework. If he has, he chooses not to mention the influence. The pronouncement is just too choice, too ludicrous.

I wonder if Joni means what she says. Maybe so, maybe not. Both are true at once. She’s upset that, because of her gender, she’s never going to be called the greatest American songwriter of her generation, regardless of her innovations. The reporter, most likely a man, probably has ideas of his own: She isn’t nurturing, isn’t compliant. She’s thorny. And what could be better than to watch a woman, an accomplished woman, take herself down in front of people?

Maybe at a certain point, after she’s had a night to think it over, she feels confused about that outbreak. She can tell that the rage reads as if it’s aimed at her audience. She must think,
is that what I’ll be remembered for? Not my guitar tunings, not my collaborations with Charlie Mingus or Jaco Pastorius, but for my temper.
But then again there is so much to be angry about, so much wrong in the world, the barbarism of the music industry, which she calls a cesspool.

I put on
Shine
, the most recent album, an album I listen to more out of loyalty than love. Plenty of people who call themselves fans won’t even touch music like this, with its songs about oil, mining, capitalism going awry. It is the child with the glowing eyes, the child that isn’t quite right, whose head got whacked by the seesaw. At the same time, this is music for a world on the brink, brought about by its own wanting, its greed.
Strange birds of appetite.
Today the oil, if we’re to believe what we read, is washing up on the shores of Dauphin Island, Alabama. The waves are actually the color of New England cider, thick, with clots of darkness in them.

High maintenance.
I think about how that phrase was once bandied about a few years back, as if a loved one—a child, a girlfriend, a friend—should be a co-op with low monthly charges. A room we could live in, without giving too much back. Turn up the lights, turn high the heat.

High maintenance: someone who gets hurt easily, someone who needs special care, who can’t go for two hours without blowing up, or sulking in wounded silence. And God help you if you should get in her way. She’s the kind of person who can ruin your weekend just when you’ve packed the car to go to Maine. She’ll send you to a therapist, make you lose your appetite, make you sit in a basement hall with a twelve-step group, among the glittering and wounded, who use phrases and metaphors you once felt superior to.

Go to him
, sings Joni.
Be with him if you can. But be prepared to bleed.

The friends I met in my thirties were different from Denise. They were people who didn’t need to fill up the room, or express what I couldn’t express for myself. We were equal partners. One didn’t need to talk more, feel more than the other. It was a time when we all thought a sane life was possible. This, of course, was before 9/11, before the Bush regime, anthrax, terrorism, torture, mass incarceration, two wars, an expanded police presence, Katrina. And did we mention the Great Recession?

Maybe, at a certain point, I allowed myself to think Denise was of a different time and place. It seemed to be that she was confusing volatility with authenticity. No other reason I would have stopped finding the need to write to her about the crucial things. I was practicing, practicing for a life I believed I could live apart from her. If I could do it, she could, too. There were always people for her, not just new friends coming into her life, but family. Always family.

Denise writes to me on my birthday in July 2005. The note is straightforward, without specifics. She doesn’t acknowledge that we haven’t exchanged notes in eight months, but that would be ridiculous. No real friend would try to stir things up on another friend’s birthday, especially if that friend was estranged.

Denise writes again on Thanksgiving afternoon, over four months later. Again, her message is cheery and fast and she doesn’t say much, other than she’s too busy to write. I write back instantly, as I wrote back last time, but in the writing of it, I’m shocked by what I’ve kept to myself.

2010 | 
On June 12, oil-laced sargassum gets into Florida’s Perdido Pass, over and through the 312,000-foot boom designed to keep out such things. Once inside, it smothers the sea grass beds and marshes, the nursery grounds for marine creatures. According to today’s
Sarasota Herald Tribune
, “Rocks, grass, hermit crabs, and all manner of debris [are] coated in the big patch of rust-colored crude.” We shouldn’t be surprised that the boom doesn’t work. They’re designed for a situation with little if any current, and here the current is coming in at seven miles per hour. The materials available aren’t enough to contain a spill of this magnitude. We’ve already moved past the initial shock; we’ve developed the hardness and skepticism of those whose country is at war. We
are
at war, anyway, an oilcentric war, which we do everything possible to forget. The lists of the dead are buried in the newspapers. When I am at the Detroit airport a few years back, a flag-draped casket of a dead soldier is carried ceremonially across the tarmac. The passengers inside the terminal gather at the windows, chastened by what’s been kept from them, by what they’ve kept from themselves. Some practically put their hands to the glass as if they’re trying to put a hand to the casket.

What is it, day fifty-six of the oil disaster? That sounds about right to me.

Some towns are resorting to their own methods of dealing with a particular plume. Some simply engage bulldozers to push sand around, to plug the openings between Gulf and bay. But in Orange Springs, they have their own particular solution, a plastic pipe from which a thirty-six-inch curtain holds back the flood.

“It will be contained,” says President Obama. “It may take some time, and it’s going to take a whole lot of effort. There is going to be damage done to the Gulf Coast.” And this washed-out rhetoric from the president whom we expected so much from twenty-seven months ago. The deliverer of our people into a new age.

Over and over, reporters talk about the hardest things to capture on video and in print: the smell of the crude, which burns the eyes and the insides of the nose. It upsets the stomach until food simply doesn’t taste good. It’s not a substance you’d want in you.

Beneath sense lay other realities, mysteries. We don’t know the half of it, and we cling to our systems and classifications as if in dread of what we can’t measure. I never knew what to make of Denise’s longtime infatuation with the unseen (psychics, tarot cards, the Ouija board, the portents of a dream), but I am a little more open to that today. Denise listened to whatever it was she heard: a pulse, some heat, a buzzing turned toward her. She did what she had to do, and twenty-plus months of cold war go down in a letter.

We are inside our friendship again. And her dream—of course Denise would always know when I was in trouble. I email her the next day, and then the next. In three days my father’s health is better, and Denise is with me through it all, in letters, for the day in and day out of it, as I am for her. There is a sentence in my novel
The Burning House
that goes:
I couldn’t unhook myself from you if I tried.
It’s nothing as unlovely as all that, though. There’s no other way to say it: my friend, my friend is back.

1966 | 
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell look a little stagey in the video. A merry-go-round rotates behind them. Their breaths gust; it looks cold out. Tammi is in a sky-blue jacket and beret; Marvin’s sport coat doesn’t look heavy enough for the weather. They’re singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” a duet that’s been climbing the charts, but the performance isn’t quite right yet. The voices don’t actually mesh with the movements of their mouths, their arms. They’re trying. They’re working. They’re giving the best smiles they can muster, but the two of them must know they’re outside the dream of the song.

Then they seem to forget all about lip-syncing. The song swells. They’re climbing higher, up the winding path into Alpine trees. Wind, rain, cold—they’re leaving the elements behind. Civilizations spread out beneath them. Tammi has more swing in her gestures. Every so often she rolls her eyes, as if all this romanticism is just too much, even though she wants the dream to go on. She taps Marvin’s square chin with her finger. He grins. It’s too much to look at her face for long. He’s glancing off to the left, not with indifference, but at a future beyond the facts. Who would want to know the facts right now? (Tammi’s death of a brain tumor at twenty-four. Marvin murdered by his own father, at home. Depression, two suicide attempts, cocaine …) For now, Marvin’s body relaxes into Tammi’s, and it is just joy for the remaining seconds of the song. Not even seconds, because we’re outside time. We’re free-floating inside the wild sphere of what two people might be for each another.