The Narrow Door (4 page)

Now Denise is walking back and forth across the living room. She is holding her cup of coffee between two hands. She puts it down, lights up a cigarette, inhales from the cigarette, reaches for the cup of coffee again. She is talking about her former teacher, Famous Writer, the writer who writes big, fat, funny-sad novels with violent accidents in them. She has corresponded with him for years. He has written to her; she has a stack of his letters to her in which he’d given her every reason to think that his marriage, a marriage to a woman he still loves, is over. Nothing could be so wrong about ripping each other’s clothes off, as she puts it, and spending the night together.

“Why doesn’t he love me?” she laughs, in a voice that knows it’s the dumbest question ever asked.

She holds up the cover of the issue of
Time
on which he appears in a red T-shirt under a tan blazer. His face looks tired, gruff, unshaven, hurt, horny. It’s the face of someone who thinks his suffering is more meaningful than yours. I like his books, especially the one in which the son loses his eye on the stick shift, but I’m troubled by his hold on her. It might be the case that Denise wants to
be
him more than she wants to be with him, but I believe she’ll figure that out in due time.

I wish she’d stop. I wish she’d talk again about
Franny and Zooey
or
Good Deeds
or the professors and TAs and any of the other grad students we know in common. Instead, she’s filling up the space with Famous Writer—or more precisely, Famous Writing. She is going on for hours with it. My eyes are grainy, my tongue thick with listening to her. And yet there’s a high buzz of excitement in the air. Outside, on the sidewalk, is Philadelphia—hear the four Archbishop Wood students cursing at some drunken girl across the street? But inside? We are characters in an Almodóvar film yet to be made. Coffee makes sluicing sounds inside the coffee maker. A cigarette burns in the ashtray socket. Joni’s
Wild Things Run Fast
is playing on her cassette deck. And now we’re sitting together on the sofa at 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, waiting for the damn kitchen phone to ring.

Just like that, it does ring.

Denise leaps. She looks at me, lets the phone ring one more time before she picks it up. And as a hello comes out of her mouth, a dial tone.

“See?”

We stay in our respective positions until the process repeats itself all over again. Another hang-up, then another.

“You think it’s him?” I say, a little wary.

“Of course it’s him,” she says, her smile getting bigger, her voice half thrilled, half hurt. Does she show me a log? I picture it on a legal pad, marked with the exact times of the hang-ups, as well as the number of rings and the length of seconds before the connection clicks off.

“He’s afraid. Men like him—
men,”
she says, drawing out the word, frowning at me.

“Always afraid. Cowards.” She picks up her cup again and puts it down a little too hard on the tabletop. A little coffee slops over the rim. “What’s wrong with men? What’s wrong?
You.”

“What?”

“Man.
Man—”

“Me?” My collar feels tighter around my neck.

“Pauly,” she says, her voice softening, her features softening, going pretty again. “Do you think I should go up there?”

By “up there,” she means the writers conference in Vermont where she was his student, where he’s teaching right now. I should just tell her that I’m out of my league, that, though I’m twenty-three, the mechanics of heterosexual romance are as comprehensible to me as the compounds that make up sodium chloride. I’d know more about building the Golden Gate Bridge than I would about men and women and the games they play regarding sex.

Her face shines. She keeps looking at me hopefully, expectantly, as if I might pull the answer from deep within myself, if only I listened.

But she’s weeping now. The weeping isn’t merely about Famous Writer and her wish to be with him, to be him. Or the hell of competition. No, her tears seem to be about the hell of wanting, which finds its way underneath your eyelids and fingernails and has no cure. I don’t know why I don’t get up from the sofa and put my arms around her. I don’t know why I sit with my hands practically folded on my lap, hoping she’ll shake herself out of it and start talking about J. D. Salinger again. She is on the left side of the room. I am on the right. We might as well be on different sides of the country, yet I could be the one to change all that. I could cross that charged space. I could close it up with my body, and the crying, the awful crying, would stop for the night.

I should just say it. I should stop keeping that starved landscape inside myself a secret. Men are on my mind all the time, not that I ever do anything about it. Certainly that must be evident in how I move and talk and walk through a room. And it’s not as if she’d be anything but all right with it. Her student John came out to her in her office one day, after an exasperating class discussion when it was assumed that men wanted one thing, and women wanted the opposite, and that was the problem from the get-go.
Well, I’m not any of those people
, John said, and Denise loved him all the more for his stubbornness, his red hair, his stark, charismatic ferocity. In fact, she brings up John all the time. But to say that I’m a John would be to say that I’m not the person she thought I was. The person she holds in high esteem. The person she thinks of as a promising writer. The person she thinks of as handsome, though I don’t know what the hell she means. I’d just be one thing, a gay thing, the person who creeps into the adult bookstore on Route 73, slips quarter after quarter into a slot (all the quarters he saves for this purpose), and dreams into the images of a forbidden world he both desperately wants to be a part of and is desperately afraid of. A world that couldn’t feel farther from the pine trees and strip malls and new subdivisions along Route 73.

There must be a good reason I keep my grandeur to myself, but I don’t know it yet. It is a little like a secret animal, with oily rank whiskers, I don’t want Denise to know about.

Can Denise already see I’ll be with another Famous Writer in eleven years? Can she already see how happy I’ll be, in a life she’ll only be a guest in? The menagerie of animals, M and I reading our first drafts to each other, roses outside, the fireplace burning …

Maybe it hurts to sense that coming. She’s already beginning to spell out an equation: Paul is the lucky one. Paul gets everything I don’t get.

“Should I go up there?” she says once more, the road map of Vermont unfolded across her lap.

I look at the length of that route, up the spine along the Hudson, across mountains, down steep grades, roads that turn and twist through villages. I think of her worn-out Buick, the car that struggles up the slope of the Ben Franklin Bridge. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.” Even if I guess that’s not what she wants to hear from me right now.

2010 | 
Darlene Etienne is pulled from the rubble in Port-au-Prince after fifteen days. It’s hard to picture it: fifteen days under the rubble of your apartment. You’re living on nothing but the little bit of the Coca-Cola you ration daily for yourself. You’re still calling out for help, even though you sense your rescuer isn’t anywhere near. You’re just doing it to move your throat membranes, because it feels better to move them than to keep them still. That movement keeps them from hurting, drying up from the dust. Then a relief worker from France hears you calling, but barely. He sees a puff of your black hair when you’re probably minutes from your own death, and he starts digging. Digging and digging and digging, with such noise and activity and a plea for you to hold on (is he digging you up, or is he digging himself up?) that you’ve forgotten how thirsty you are, how your tongue feels like a wood chip in your mouth, how your skin hurts when anything rubs against it. And not much later, you’re part of a story that’s not even about you any longer, but the absurd spectacle of reporters, relief workers, and your fellow citizens cheering and applauding your dusty body as it is hauled into the back of an ambulance.

And as for J. D. Salinger, who dies today?

I’m in the middle of writing the previous paragraph—I’ve distracted myself by looking at Twitter—when the news comes in. It takes a good twenty seconds to hit, and when it does, I stop writing. My attention isn’t capable of much, even as I wonder whether my reaction is authentic. Perhaps I am enjoying the private theater of it all—luckily I’m all alone in the house today. Maybe my body just needs to weep. Maybe I haven’t even wept since Denise’s death. I have become a little hard these days, my bullshit detector extra-refined, scalpel-sharp. I’m wary of any writing that wants to provoke tears, any gesture that has the slightest stink of familiarity about it. Anything that asks the reader to say yes to some received truth.

So what is it I’m doing? Why do I step aside from my story to start digging up quotes from Salinger’s work? As soon as I find them, I post them, and watch in wonder as people comment and pass them around:

The depths these quotes sound. Brashness and tenderness and crankiness and love. Self-absorption and loneliness, the loneliness of the unheard, the unseen. The cadence of plain speech, expressive and overwhelmed, overstimulated. A voice that’s been so absorbed into American literature that you can’t even hear it as distinct anymore. How far that voice seems from the cool, neutral tone of minimalism. A week or so later I’ll pick up the
New Yorker
and read Adam Gopnik’s tribute and find two quotes that will seem to say everything—at least for that moment:

The other revelation, the visceral revelation bringing about those tears, is that those stories fed us once: Denise, me, Famous Writer. All the way from the tone and characters to the constellation of names. Our work spoke back to that work: it paid it homage. How could we have forgotten that? Maybe it is just that Salinger was the voice of youth, and it was inevitable that we’d outgrow that voice as our interests turned toward the work of adulthood.

But my guess is that there’s another explanation. A voice goes out of fashion. A voice gets associated with popularity, which translates to pandering. It is said that Salinger loves his characters too much, and we say, yes, you might be right. He can’t possibly see that you might not want to put up with a seven-year-old Seymour going on and on and on. He simply isn’t generous enough with his audience. And as for the difference between imagination and reality? Well, he should have a better handle on that.

And someone dies and everything comes back to you. You think: That voice fed me once. That cadence is in my writing, my speech, my hearing. In what I call my ear.

I go back to the sentences about unlearning the differences. I get two cranky replies to my posts from people who think Salinger is mediocrity incarnate, the end of standards.
You tell me how you can
“unlearn,” Professor
, says one. And I take some pleasure in telling the young man that it must be a lucky thing to know so much.

Unlearn. I don’t go back to see the passage in context, but I do feel its purity, its faith in the breaking down of boundaries, the good of that. The quote is the kind of quote Whitman would have liked. The narrator is talking about the act of making, the act of refreshing the world for the weary traveler who thinks he’s seen it all. And the most amazing thing is that these words are received on a crosstown bus, which dissolves the line between east side and west.

How could we have forgotten him?

Or the young woman, for that matter. That young Haitian woman is found six days after the rescue mission had called it quits. Of course they’d called it quits. The prospect of finding anyone at this late stage, in horrible condition, is too much to bear. Better to declare everyone dead and make it official. Better to kill hope and go on with the next thing.

Then I remember the obvious truth: it is all too easy to let go of the things we loved once.

1984 | 
Denise is outside the Barn at the Famous Writers Conference arguing with Famous Writer. The day is windy, dry, bright—or mostly bright. Clouds tower over the mountain. These aren’t summer clouds; they look like winter. They anticipate the first frost, which will come sooner here than any other parts of the Northeast. Who knows what Denise and Famous Writer are saying? Other writers—teachers, staff, students—walk by, pretending to look away. Later, they’ll probably talk about it at dinner. Later, they’ll compare notes: Do you know anything about that woman? Yes, she was a contributor here; she wrote a novel that’s coming out in the spring. But their real interest will be Famous Writer, whose gruff face has lost any tinge of its smoky handsomeness this minute. He is older. His hands are flying up, just as Denise’s are flying up. They make chopping motions to underscore a point. He’s lost any air of patrician boarding school control, and it infuriates him—this is happening before his colleagues, his students. As quietly as possible, he says,
I can’t see you now, I don’t want to see you. I think you might be crazy.
And he storms off inside the Barn, to leave Denise standing outside.

Does she look out toward the buildings, the kelly-green shutters, the butter-colored clapboard? Does she look around for someone who might know and support her, another contributor from last year? Does she hold herself with her arms, or does she let those arms hang free, waiting for Famous Writer to walk out of the Barn to say, I’m sorry. Maybe her heart is beating too fast for her to register it. Maybe she simply walks out to the highway, looks to her brother, who’s waiting in the car beneath a tree, studying sheet music on his lap.
Go
, she says.
What happened?
Joey says.
Let’s go
, she says, louder now.
Den
, he says, and shakes his head.
We’ve driven all the way up here. What did that jerk say to you?
But she motions forward with her hands, remains silent, as if the whole thing is Joey’s fault, and they’re off, past the general store, past the creek rushing along the roadside, through the woods, down the mountain into town.