The Narrow Door (9 page)

But Gauguin has a different idea. He finally comes to Aries after repeated requests. Is he coming because he really wants to live and paint with Vincent, or is it because he feels hounded and it’s just too hard to say no? He doesn’t know, but he gives in one day. He arrives, sets up his easel, and within a matter of days, he’s painting Vincent’s portrait,
The Painter of Sunflowers.
He persuades Vincent to paint from memory, as he does, and in a matter of days they even embark on a collaborative work, an outdoor project at the Alyscamps.

But the closeness to Vincent is killing him. He can’t stop himself from arguing with him; he’s not even sure he believes in the points he’s arguing for, but Vincent brings it out in him. Vincent is turning him into someone he isn’t. Vincent is turning him into a monster, someone who wants to hurt Vincent, for Vincent is just waiting for Gauguin to desert him at any minute. How could Gauguin not be exhausted from it, those eyes always turned to him, those ears just waiting for that strain of formal speech, which Vincent will translate to:
I don’t love you anymore.

And even while these things are happening, they’ll get the sense that the falling out isn’t exactly of them, or inside them; it’s out of their control. They’ve gotten hold of the notion that one person’s success means the other’s failure. For Gauguin, however, it’s even more complicated than that—it is part of a deep internal knowing that he’s not afraid to admit to. As much as he’d like to be brothers with Vincent, equally recognized by some hard but loving mother, that mother will always love one better. Currying the favor of the invisible mother: isn’t that the essence of competition? And so Gauguin pulls away, which is why Vincent cuts his own earlobe. Or does Gauguin cut it, in a sword attack, in anger or self-defense, as some historians claim? Rather than turn his friend in, Vincent takes the ear to a prostitute and staggers home. His last written words to his estranged friend: “You are quiet, I will be, too.”

1986 | 
I wait tables breakfast, noon, and dinner. I wait tables as if I’ve balanced trays and taken requests with a benevolent smile my whole life. I have a conversation with Francine Prose, who’s not yet Francine Prose, about the work of Jane Bowles. I listen to Nancy Willard on the porch of the main house, trying not to rock my rocking chair too hard, trying to look in her face as if to reassure her that everything she says is helpful to me. She quotes John Gardner: “A decision to make a character a victim is disastrous.” I try to store up everything she says while mosquitoes raise welts on my inner arm. I put so much effort into impersonating the look of the successful young writer of the day—J. Press shirts, Brooks Brothers grosgrain watchband, and Birdwell Beach Britches for swimming—that I can’t even tell how much it’s wearing me down. Perhaps germs are already brewing in me, like the coffee molecules brewing inside the urns in the dining hall. I’m not exactly shocked when I come down with strep throat a week after my departure, as if my body would need to rebel, to lie on its back for two weeks.

But at every turn I’m thinking about Denise. Not just what I’ll report back to her, but what I’ll withhold from her: I don’t want her to think I’m having too good a time. I look at the pond, and I remember a story she once told me about Mark Strand’s dismissal of one student’s work: “If I’d written a poem like this, I’d jump in the pond.” I look up at the podium in the theater and wish she were here to listen to Tim O’Brien, whom she always refers to as Tim, though I don’t think she’s ever met him. It occurs to me that I’m looking and listening for two people. My appreciation for the cloud passing over the mountain is her appreciation as well, but it’s hard to split oneself in half like that. Is she wondering about me back where she is in South Jersey, where it must be humid today, where there must already be a kind of melancholy on the air? Summer is almost over, sweaters are on the shelves, and you couldn’t find a folding beach chair in the hardware store, even if you bribed the clerk to go looking for one in the stock room.

I am afraid of saying the wrong thing. But I can also sense that it will be hard to keep the wrong thing trapped.

I think of Famous Writer. That space in front of the Barn is always the space of Famous Writer, even though he hasn’t been back in years, and I walk past that zone warily as if he might leap out from behind the bushes.

I make friends. That’s not so hard to do. There is a woman named Julie, who recently graduated from Cornell. She is tiny and sarcastic, with a clipped cranberry-colored Manic Panic bob. She looks like Edith Piaf might have looked if she were young now and listened only to the Smiths, New Order, Style Council, and the Cure. Like me, she likes to laugh, but she always has a sad look in her eye, as if she already knows too well that her life will not work out like others might want it to. I like her writing, especially the descriptions in her writing, which have a liveliness and snap to them. It seems to me that everything should be lined up for her. She could be a star. She seems to know that too well about herself, which might be why she’s wary of all that. When it’s time for the waiters to play volleyball, a requirement of sorts, we slink off from the others, sit beneath a pine, and talk about Susan Minot’s
Monkeys
, the collection of the moment, not sure whether we approve of it or not. We also wonder who might and might not be gay, though I know very well to keep my mouth shut about myself.

I’m in my room one night. Everyone around me seems to be having sex. People tiptoe down fire escapes onto the lawn long after midnight, people have sex in the woods, in their coats, lying in cold, wet leaves. Even a fellow waiter who was just married two weeks before is leaning into the shoulder of another Famous Writer in the Barn, as if they’ve already gone to bed, or are planning to fuck any minute. Sex is expected of us, sex is charging up the air, but what would my roommate, admittedly a very nice guy, a runner and a wonderful writer, think if he knew I thought about dick a hell of a lot more than he did? Maybe he already knows that I think a lot about dick, which is why another waiter walks in one night, pounds on my stomach while I’m lying on the bed and cries, who are you going to fuck tonight? I laugh uproariously, as if by doing so I’m taking away the sting of the accusation, or the demand inside it. I know he is certainly not talking about fucking anything with a dick, for the message is clear: to be part of the group you must like chicks.

One day I see Michael Cunningham, who isn’t yet Michael Cunningham of
The Hours.
He is standing along the windows, in the aisle of the theater. His arms are crossed over his chest; his face is glowing, tanned, sympathetic, wry, alert. He is pretending he is not being watched by everyone in the room when in fact he knows he is. At that moment he is the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. He looks like someone who knows his reaction is important; he knows we’re more likely to steal looks at him instead of the polite reader of the polite work who’s standing behind the podium. Later I tell him that I’m a fan of his first novel. I tell him that I know Denise, as he and Denise have the same editor. But do I let on that I’m attracted to men? Of course not. And he doesn’t let on anything about himself either. That is the contract of the day, and we agree to it without realizing what we’re giving up, simply because we, too, want to be standing behind that podium up front. And not only that, we want a place at the table, the head table, but we can’t yet conceive of doing that if we let on that there are concurrent lives going on in our heads.

On the day of our departure, Julie and I fall into each other’s arms and weep. We weep and weep, though our weeping is soundless. We don’t shake. Hot tears soak into the shoulders of our T-shirts. Everyone around is loading up their cars, standing outside them with folded arms: all these people we’ll never see again. We begin to laugh at ourselves, but we don’t look each other in the face lest we start crying all over. I think we know that our friendship is only bound to this moment, that it would be impossible to sustain it with such intensity, with me in New Jersey and her in Baltimore.

Besides, I am already tied to someone.

In the mid-1980s Joni Mitchell wants us to know that her search for love is over. After years of relationships coming together and falling apart, she wants to let us know, through her music at least, that she’s married and met her match. In theory this is a good thing. If only those happy songs—“We got this solid love”—could stand up next to the more complicated songs. Denise and I probably want to like these songs more than we do. It’s not that we want Joni to be miserable. It’s just that the positive feeling behind those happy songs is so absolute. Where are the oppositions, the nuance, the ambivalence, “the hope and hopelessness of thirty years”? The new songs almost spit cheerfully in the faces of the troubled songs that have preceded them, the troubled songs we’ve been identifying with. They say, that Joni? Well, that Joni was screwed up, selfish; she just wanted too much. She was unlucky in love. She made bad choices, she gave herself away to childish, narcissistic men. Denise and I are willing to entertain that. But it’s confusing to have identified love with trouble for so long, and now we’re supposed to think of love as pure.

Then another album comes out. The album opens with one of our favorites, “Good Friends,” a love song that doesn’t appear to be troubled by sexual tension. Sure, the two friends have their disagreements, but their love takes care of them in the end. But the other songs on the album make me nervous. They’re hard songs, angry songs, songs about the environment, songs against war and capitalism and advertising—all the right causes—but they’re as subtle as billboards, with none of the singular chord progressions and harmonic leaps that make Joni’s songs what they are. They’re external songs; they don’t enact inquiry, a mind at work; they already know what they think before they start, before she even writes them. In that way they sound like the songs of someone who’s trying to write a Joni song.

The question keeps ticking after so many years: if she is so happy, then why are these songs so pissed off?

Or maybe that isn’t fair. On one level she doesn’t want to repeat what she’s done again and again. In that way, she’s a model for any artist who reinvents herself over time. But it’s impossible not to hear these songs without hearing her husband’s influence, the straightforward harmonic progressions, the blocky synthesizer chords, the overbright sound of the day. He’s all over the album, from his face on the cover, to his name as songwriter, even though Thomas Dolby has been credited as producer. I don’t doubt that he’s a nice guy, you can see it in his face. To be honest, he reminds me a little bit of myself, with his long lashes, his big nose, the short space between that nose and his upper lip. His tendency to smile and please—it’s all there. It’s good that Joni has somebody to care for her, but it’s unnerving to see her give up so much of herself when she shares the stage with her husband. How willingly she lets go of her boundaries, allowing herself to be subsumed, even when that husband probably doesn’t want to subsume her. Yes, she is mad about the rain forest and mad about televangelists and the possibility of nuclear annihilation—no one in his or her right mind isn’t—but there have to be other reasons why the songs are so goddamn furious.

1987 | 
In theory, Denise now has the relationship that should enable her to concentrate on her writing. A husband who gives her time to herself, a husband who believes in the project of her writing and wants it to be seen and taken in by serious readers. A writer himself, he is getting attention for his nonfiction. Competition couldn’t be further from his mind. He travels at every opportunity; he gives talks at colleges, gives interviews on radio and television, works as a language consultant to corporations. He’s making money, doing what he can to give the three of them a good life. Denise could be writing. Denise
should
be writing. Instead, she spends much of her time thinking about a table.

If only she had the right writing table, Denise thinks, she’d be able to sit still for more than minutes at a time; she’d be able to work with fervor and fury on the novels, stories, and essays waiting to be written. The table cannot be a new table. The table must possess the aura of generations coming to life around it. She knows, in part, that her reasoning is absurd. She already has a study that most other writers would kill for, in a quiet room upstairs, far from the noise of the road. But the search for a table consumes weeks, months.

One day, my mother and I stand outside the family summerhouse to greet Denise and Austen. They are coming to visit for the day. Our Boston terrier tears three times around the back lawn before Austen leans over to pick her up. Pebbles’s eyes are startlingly wide; she’s panting and frantic, but it’s a happy frantic. In truth it must be a relief for my mother and Denise to lay eyes on each other, to spend time together, to find out that they like each other. We ask my mother if she’d like to join us at the boardwalk, but she says no. She says she has to go out to the store to buy food for dinner.
You don’t have to make dinner, Anne
, Denise says. My mother says,
Oh, I want to make dinner.
Denise says,
Do you want me to help? Do you want us to bring some fish back?
My mother is stirred up with the prospect of this joint project.

She is quick to make jokes that aren’t afraid of a little irreverence, as if she wants to let Denise know that she isn’t dead to the fun parts of herself. It is the quality that always drew my friends to my mother. It is the quality that said, don’t think of me as a mother, anything but that. I am your friend, your equal. And maybe on a certain level her offer to cook is a way to apologize to the woman she’d spent a considerable number of hours mistrusting, embroiled in some kind of imagined rivalry.

I don’t remember if we stop by Emily’s house before we walk the boardwalk. Certainly we must, even though Austen, who’s in the backseat, must be eager to ride the rides, and eat every nasty thing one could possibly eat on a boardwalk: cotton candy, Copper Kettle Fudge, Mack and Manco pizza. I imagine the three of us getting out of the car; maybe I’m even holding Austen’s hand, which might be warm and pleasantly sticky. We circle the yellow house three times, as if the three of us can imagine sharing it, hanging our laundry on the back line to dry, heating up water in a teakettle inside. And in doing that, we almost forget that it’s not Emily’s house, but our own.