The Narrow Door (22 page)

2010 | 
I can’t foresee that my new friendship with Braunwyn will fall apart weeks after the summer is out. She’ll want more than I’m able to give, though she’ll insist that that’s not true. She’ll want so much that I’ll sag under the weight of disappointing her. Over and over, she makes me feel as if I am disappointing her.

I take the train to meet her at her house in Montclair. I play with her two dogs; I hang out with her husband, her son. We have the nicest times when we go out to restaurants, but we cannot seem to have an in-depth conversation without Braunwyn pulling the subject back to M. Over and over the subject comes back to M, which is magnetizing in the early days—I don’t want to hate this new M—but confusing finally. The worst version of him is reflected back to me and I cannot say I like it. I will always be protective of M, especially against any version that wants to simplify him. She keeps saying she can identify with him, at the same time she makes him seem a little like a monster. He is not a monster. And yet I can’t shake her admission, spoken with soft, bemused pride, that every relationship she’s counseled through a difficult patch has ended up in divorce. By the time I’m getting back on the train, I’m down again. My mouth tastes of dirt. I can’t even lift my head to look at the houses and lights going by. And what of the apartment she wants to rent together in Ocean Grove this winter? I think of her face on the night of my birthday, intent, expectant, as if in wait for me to say: let’s run away. By September I’ll stop returning her emails and calls, but not without missing her and feeling just awful about it.

So I turn to my old friend Marie. I walk over to her place on Barrow Street some nights and we talk. The apartment is a little like a boat, a white boat, floating on the tops of the trees. From the living room sofa you can see the Empire State Building. The lights at the top are blue tonight. Sometimes I read to her daughter, Inan, who lies on her stomach, on the pink rag rug, head down, listening. Sometimes Marie and I hang out in her tiny kitchen, drinking seltzer, eating watermelon. A breeze blows through the open window. I am at home here, even if I only stop by a couple of hours a week. Marie must know that that’s necessary.

And there’s Elizabeth. Though she’s in Austin, she might as well be around the block from me. I talk to her all the time on the phone. We exchange long, involved emails. She has known M and me since the beginning; she knows more than anyone how broken up I am. She expresses concern when she finds out that I’ve lost twenty-five pounds in less than two months. She is not afraid to make me laugh, though. No one can make me laugh like Elizabeth. Her irreverence is as necessary as rain, and I try to say funny things back to her in my head, even when I’m just looking at the faces passing by on the sidewalk.

2010 | 
I step off the train and spot him instantly: I believe he is the smallest golden retriever I’ve ever seen. His hair is like the hair on a chick, but thicker. He is down at the foot of the ramp, beside M, who gives me a hug, a big hug. I put down my bag and crouch. I say, hey,
hey
, to the dog in front of me. He looks everywhere but at my face; he jumps at the slam of a van door, wrenches his head to listen to a song sparrow. I reach out to hold him around his ribs. For a second he makes eye contact with me, then sneezes all over my face. I laugh, I approve of its spray. A lady from the other side of the parking lot laughs; she approves of it, too. I am overstimulated. It’s my first visit back to Springs since S left for good—the first time in over a month—and so many feelings are playing out; they are canceling one another out. I am wary of coming back home. We are drawing closer again; is our separation coming to a close? Whatever the case, it is good to have a new dog around to distract and center us, to help us though yet another transition.

We stop at a coffee place. During our time on the front porch, the dog won’t look at me for more than a second at a time. We head home. The dog won’t look at me for the rest of the afternoon, into the night. All that changes the next morning when rustlings wake me up at five thirty, and I step out of the bed to see the creature looking up at me. He’s slapping his tail so hard against the flagstone floor that it must hurt. And what is your name? I say, as I kneel before him, the dense weight of his head pressing against my breastbone. So many names held up and cast aside: Clark, Grant, Buddy, Lars, Nils, Sven, Stig, Luke, but somehow only Ned seems to work. He’s been called Ned so many times now that it would seem false to add another name to the list, even though the name seems to mean as much to him as
cake
or
twig
or
switchblade.
How long will it take before he answers to his name?

In days I am caught up in life with Ned. Ned on the front porch of the Springs General Store, Ned at the coffee bar in Montauk, Ned squeaking through a hole in the deer fence, Ned falling in the fish pond, Ned falling headfirst into the toilet as he’s trying to take a drink. Ned growling at Clarabelle, an elderly dog with cancer-unfamiliar walk? candied, chemical smell? Sickness, death—this must be the first time he’s coming into contact with mortality, at least among his kind. Maybe he isn’t even barking at the dog herself, but at what’s inside her, the death that wants to take her down, take him down. This knowledge is just where life begins, though no one, not even a three-month-old puppy, wants to be confronted with that.

Ned beside me as I’m standing at the toilet, and his face looking up to meet mine, and instantly he pees, too, but right on the floor tile, beside my left sneaker.

The three of us are in our respective places in the car, heading west through Queens into the city for errands and appointments and what will turn out to be Ned’s first Manhattan trip. The anxiety of it, the excitement—or perhaps it’s just the dire intensity of the past five weeks—has sharpened me. My consciousness is a fresh pencil point, and every sense, every impression gets written down and named. The Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park seems weird to me all over again, as I hold Ned on my lap. He looks out in the general direction of the fair. Joni’s
Night Ride Home
is playing on the stereo. Occasionally, I sing along, and am surprised by how many of the lines I know, as I’d never thought it was one of her best albums. But just as M and I are singing “Come In from the Cold,” I understand this album, this particular sequence of songs in a way I’d never gotten them before. Each song a coming to terms with the end of youth, the end of sex, or at least a certain kind of sex that leads us to places where we don’t always want to go. (Denise and her golfer, Denise and Famous Writer, Denise and the next-door neighbor.) But it’s terrible to move beyond all that, because it feeds us just as it depletes us, right?
Is this just vulgar electricity or the edifying fire?
It’s all there in those nine words, and I think both M and I feel the question in exactly the same way, at the same time. I’m sure anyone in the cars to the right or left of us would look in at us and think, look at those two singing so unselfconsciously. Could there be a happier couple? And just as the Empire State Building rises over the road ahead of us, that thought catches in my throat, and I’m holding on to the dog in my lap, missing the life I once thought I’d lived. I thought I was happier—than anyone.

2008 | 
Only days away from the end of the fall term, and I’m already thinking toward the three months we’re going to spend in Palo Alto, California, where M has a guest appointment at a university. I haven’t been too keen on any guest appointment ever since North Carolina. Part of that simply has to do with having bad luck with living spaces, houses that don’t feel conducive to concentration and focus and sitting still. Not that one should be surprised by that. No one who truly loves his house packs up his things and rents to strangers for five months every year. But it is impossible to say no to California, with its palms and plants and promise of sunlight. I must know on a certain level that I want to step out of my life, my mother’s illness. In just a few weeks, she’ll break her hip after a fall in the night, and we won’t know whether she’ll be able to stay on at Ranmar Gardens, the assisted living facility; she might need more care than that. And Denise? Well, of course I want to be nearby. I want to be closer than the hour-and-twenty-minute train ride from New York. But I also want to be on the other side of the continent, far away from illness and decay, where trees are beginning to bud, and where redwoods grow beside palms and blooming bougainvillea, even at the coldest point of the year, when the sun is lowest in the sky.

“And how long are you going to be in California?” Denise says.

There’s a longer-than-usual silence after I tell her two months, which isn’t exactly the truth. Instinctively, I know not to say ten weeks.

“Okay,” she says, considering. There’s a pragmatic quality to her yes, an achieved sense of neutrality that isn’t the Denise of old. The Denise of old would have let her disappointment be known, maybe not directly, but indirectly, and it might not have always been pretty. But the delay in her response isn’t about disappointment. Negotiation is deeper than disappointment, which is why she might take the conversation back to small things, to Christmas presents and where we might buy black ribbon and silver wrapping paper.

2010 | 
Another headline: SIGNS OF REGROWTH SEEN IN LOUISIANA MARSH.

Headlines like these are everywhere right now, almost four months after the Gulf oil spill began, and they’re not just coming from right-wing, pro-business operations, but from organizations that claim to care about the environment, the health of children, the elderly, the animals. I wonder how many people read past the headlines; the narrative certainly doesn’t promise an involving story. Maybe we simply don’t have it in us to say that things don’t get better. Maybe, in America at least, we have a hard time living with the notion that anything might stay the same, or get worse, for that matter, no matter how many cynical statements we might use to protect ourselves. No matter how many small businesses go bankrupt, no matter how many libraries close in the inner cities, no matter how many bombs are dropped, or people jailed and tortured overseas.

But it might not be that simple. Maybe such reports have a deeper purpose. Maybe they want to tell us it is okay to do damage because damage is never permanent. It doesn’t alter cell structures, it doesn’t break minds or souls or bones, because it wants to tell us that growth is always stronger than death. Pour ammonia on the trunk of a tree, and look, sprouts at the top of that blackened trunk! Cause and effect? Who says that one thing necessarily begets another? The forces that move the world along might be much more complicated, more random and omnidirectional, than we’ve begun to know.

There’s the president, swimming with his daughters in the Gulf, just to show the country that we’ve put all this trouble behind us. Click goes the camera, and the faces of his children travel all over the world in a second.

Maybe the harder thing is to recognize that growth might not happen without a little damage first. I say that from the position of someone who would do anything not to do damage, even though some of that might be entirely out of my hands.

A few months back I spent a week in Florida, mostly on the west coast, which I hadn’t seen since my twenties. I’d written off that part of Florida as unfriendly, socially conservative. I saw no reason ever to go back, and yet there I was, on a tour of colleges in the Tampa Bay area. I was at dinner with my friends Ira and Katie and two of their grad students, and we got to talking about Florida, more specifically the Florida of armadillos and wood storks, pygmy rattlers and any of the creatures or plants that remind residents they’re not just anywhere. It occurred to me that this was the Florida that had riveted my childhood imagination. It was the Florida I’d forgotten after having spent so much time in sculpted, manmade Broward County, where my parents had settled, so denatured that I hadn’t even been bitten by a mosquito in fifteen years. So on a Saturday morning, I spent an hour in a wildlife sanctuary on the south shore of Charlotte Harbor, in Punta Gorda. I got out of the car. I walked toward the boardwalk. As soon as I stepped onto the planks through the mangroves, I caught myself welling up. I knew I could have stayed in those trees for hours, all day in fact, the sun warming my arms, the wind pushing the leaves around. What was it I’d left behind? The question seemed insurmountable, and I wanted it back, whatever it was. Far out into the harbor, past sailboats and channel markers, three dolphins stitched the surface then went under, and stayed under. I didn’t see them again, though I kept looking. And deep in cold water, where I couldn’t possibly see her, a manatee scoured the channel for plants.

2009 | 
I tell myself I like Palo Alto. I like its Arts and Crafts houses. I like its walking downtown, its intricate, inhabited gardens, its neighborhoods of Eichler houses (Greenmeadow, Fairmeadow), but I can’t stop getting lost. It takes genuine mental effort to say that west is toward the mountains, maybe because the town wasn’t built on a north-south-east-west grid, but wrenched to the left and up, so I never quite know where I am on the map. The second time I go for a run I get bold enough to take a shortcut past the elementary school, and the next thing I know, I’ve made several wrong turns. I don’t know where east is. I don’t know where downtown is, and the live oaks are so dense in this part of town that I can’t even see the mountains. It feels as if I’ve wandered into a genteel piece of Beverly Hills that broke off and floated several hundred miles to the north, and there isn’t a person in sight. All life seems to transpire behind palms and walls and windows with their shades pulled down, and it certainly doesn’t help that I don’t have any identifiers in my pocket or on my person, no wallet, no cell phone, no GPS. Of course I end up finding my own way, but it takes a good hour. I’m so humbled I literally jump at the sight of two seven-year-old girls who leap out from behind a parked Volkswagen as a joke. My feet are chafed and sore inside my sneakers, and along with my sense of direction, I wonder whether I’ve lost my sense of humor.