The Narrow Door (28 page)

I think: if I can know M after those words of last night, then maybe I will have passed through the narrow door.

I think: sunlight might be on the other side of that narrow door, but I have no clue as to what that sunlight might be.

2009 | 
The sky over the beach is part golden, part gray-blue cloud. There has never been a sky like it. It’s a sky that doesn’t know what weather it wants to be. Out to sea there must be a storm: foam rises higher and higher on the strand. The water is warm, tropical, which can happen when you’re this far out on Long Island, where the Gulf Stream passes just miles off the coast. At Shinnecock Bay, forty miles to the west, that warm water passes through the narrow channel of the inlet, filling the bay with species you’d never otherwise find this far north. Lionfish, triggerfish, all the fish you’d expect in Florida. Then the bay temperature starts dropping on the first cold night in September. Do they go back out the channel, heading back to the waters that brought them here? Probably the river only takes them one way, and maybe they’ve always known that. But the crazy adventure that brought them here! The rushing current, the sun rising, the ring of fire at sunset. They look for a place to be still. They store up on plankton, algae, mollusks. They find a nook inside some favorite rocks and pilings and breathe and concentrate and bear into the cold.

We are worn out after the long ride back from Philadelphia. Before we go to bed that night—it is an early bedtime, ten o’clock?—we walk the beach at Indian Wells. People are building bonfires, gathering driftwood to burn. Blankets are anchored with stones and clam shells at the corners. A beach wagon is stuck in the sand. The sea is unexpectedly rough, waves breaking in double rows, one at the sandbar, the other a hundred feet out. Torches are lit. Could any night be more beautiful? A wave crashes onto my shorts, but I’m okay with it. Down the beach, a wave crashes all the way up to the dune line, swamping two women and their German shepherd, and they’re okay with it, too.

2010 | 
Quarter to six in the evening. M speeds south on I-95 in Groton, Connecticut, as it now looks possible to make the six o’clock boat back to Orient Point, on Long Island’s North Fork. A car idles in front of us in the exit lane, on the wide bridge over the Thames. A few turns to the left, a red light, maybe two, and M rushes up to the ferry booth. I have a reservation, he says. The man taps some figures into a keyboard. “You’re on,” says the ferry man. M drives, swerves, pulls ahead to lane three, and not two seconds after he stops, I get out of the car. All the other cars are already parked, brakes engaged. People chatter on the decks above, taking pictures, tempting gulls. They’re looking toward the naval base for submarines, periscopes. I take my bags from the backseat and place them on the pavement. I hold Ned’s head to my chest, breathe in the scent of his fur, still pungent, weedy from the beach. I say good-bye to M. I hug him longer than I would have expected to hug him, before I hurry across the tracks to the train station.

They are going to Springs, I am going to Manhattan. If all goes well, I should be in the apartment by ten thirty tonight.

The terminal is strangely underpopulated for a summer night. A boy and a girl run around in circles. Their shoes attack the floor, their voices booming up into the vaulted ceiling.

I stand at the windows, waiting for the white ferry to move past.

Does he wave at me? I am looking. M does wave back at me, from the deck of the second level.

A passing thought occurs to me: maybe the real love story of M and Paul might only be just beginning.

2009 | 
Denise’s memorial reading takes place in November, down a dark hallway at City College. The event happens through the kind attention of a professor who offered us the space after coming across pictures of Denise I’d posted online. I never expected more than a classroom, but the college has even paid for food. Who will come to eat this beautiful food? I’m grateful, but also anxious that no one will show up—or worse, just a few. I want this to go well. No one comes to readings anymore, not even for famous writers, not in Manhattan. We’re not even in the most accessible part of Manhattan, all the way up on 138th Street, blocks from the subway. First two undergraduates step at the door. They look inside. They look cautious, shy. I say hello—their careful gestures make me feel shy. They sit feet from the door, maybe because they’re worried that the night might be too reverent, too tearful, too insidery. Then comes Denise’s mother, then Austen and her fiancé, then a few of Denise’s friends from way back. Iris’s assistant editor, David, walks into the room along with my high school friend, Janet, a therapist, whom I haven’t seen in years. My friends Susan and Sarah, excellent writers. I’m happy to see everyone. In a little while thirty-five people sit around a seminar table, facing a podium, waiting for a reading to begin.

M reads, Victoria reads, David reads, Joe reads, B reads. No one talks about Denise. No one is talking about missing her or the books that won’t be written and read. We’re listening to what we have. Six of us read from thirty years of work: novels, essays, stories. Patterns emerge. Variations in tone. The comic Denise against the serious Denise. In one story, the two sides in the same voice. What is it like to know a single human in time? That is the question that inevitably organizes our listening. There’s nothing more absorbing than thinking about all these changes over the years. It’s not that the progression is linear. It’s just that her obsessions—the twin poles of shame and grace—move like a spiral, rotating around a core.

The program ends after eighty minutes, not a minute more. No one takes up too much time and space. There was never a ceremony that went off with so little work. We all say good-bye to one another, reluctant to step into the hall. We don’t want this night to end. So a few of us linger, as a man, a complete stranger in the room, fills his pockets with bread.

I pull some grapes from a stem.

Then we turn off the lights.

2010 | 
One of Denise’s old friends wants to let me in on a secret. In the past weeks Denise’s friends have been calling to tell me Denise’s secrets: men she slept with, men who came back to say good-bye-one to simply hold her through the length of an afternoon—after she’d told them she was dying. These friends have the honor of holding on to this piece of her. They’re betraying Denise—they know that—but opening up our sense of her. What good is a secret if it cannot be betrayed? By telling me these secrets, they are making her come to life again, in them, in us. They are expecting secrets back—or an intimacy. She flickers for a bit before she’s gone, just as most of them flicker and burn out over the months.

Another friend writes to tell me she has Denise’s diary for the year 2004. She would like me to have it—but she would like to sit down with me first, in person, to interpret what is on the page. 2004—the year we didn’t talk. I clench up inside—no, it isn’t right! That year must stay cloistered. I want to keep asking questions, I want to believe that she’s impossible to know, as all of us are impossible to know. How else to keep her alive in me? I want Denise to keep growing taller, wider: a redwood with many rings.

I am not yet ready to share her with anyone, not now.

The email goes unanswered.

2012 | 
How tempting it is to do the alchemical now. To turn darkness into light, bread into flesh, tin into gold, wine into blood. It’s what narrative wants of us, at least this part of the narrative. It wants to comfort, not that we should necessarily link comfort to weakness. Couldn’t there be some rigor to comfort? I’d like to think story could give it that, to give the hurting in us strength and power. So we will not leave the page without reserving a pasture for darkness, inscrutability. If we don’t acknowledge that pasture, if we don’t respect the secret creatures that might be grazing there, those creatures may turn on us. They might loom and howl and bear down on us because they need to eat, as all creatures need to eat. “One creature eats another,” says Marie after Inan asks why some people love meat. “That’s just the way of things.” Marie doesn’t say it with sorrow. She doesn’t say it with anger. The world is not ugly to her. She says it as fact. But I don’t want to eat the living—not Denise, not M, not the animals in the pasture or the trees. “You don’t have to,” says Marie. “That’s the news. Here, have a glass of water. Drink.” But there’s no getting around the structure of the world. The world eats all things, and in doing that, the grass is fed. “The unkempt hair of graves,” as Whitman describes grass. I step out with the others, onto the meadow, into the fragrant pond. I don’t yet know what to make of any of this. And the creatures nestle beneath the trees before they start their eating again.

Love and thanks to Karen Bender, Deborah Lott, Elizabeth McCracken, Susan Stinson, and Lisa Zeidner for their friendship and for being such dedicated readers of this manuscript.

Love and thanks, too, to Polly Burnell, Maggie Conroy, Kathleen Graber, Lauren Grodstein, James Allen Hall, Marie Howe, Richard McCann, Angelo Nikolopoulos, Victoria Redel, Martha Rhodes, Katrina Roberts, Patrick Rosal, Salvatore Scibona, Oren Sherman, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Dawn Walsh, and Dara Wier. Also to my family: my father, Bobby, Michael, Sandy, Jordan. Carlos Castellar.

To the Piccoli family: love. To Austen.

Thanks to the Returning Residency program of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where parts of this book were written. To Allison Devers and David Selden for the year in Asbury Park.

To Fiona McCrae, Katie Dublinski, Steve Woodward: the very best.

Michael Taeckens!

Emily Louise Smith. Stephanie Manuzak.

To J. S.

And to M. Of course.

PAUL LISICKY
is the author of
Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House
, and
Unbuilt Projects.
His work has appeared in
Tin House, Fence, Ploughshares
, the
Iowa Review, Conjunctions
, and the
Offing
, among other magazines and anthologies. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers University-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. He divides his time between New York City and Philadelphia.

The text of
The Narrow Door
is set in Warnock Pro. Book design by Connie Kuhnz. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.