One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (14 page)

Beside me, a man in a wheelchair quacks at a young woman pedaling past on a ten-speed bicycle. She seems weary, glaring over, and is gone. But, still, he’s amused, self-satisfied, maybe a little daft. Solidly middle-aged, gray hair tied back into a ponytail, a bag of groceries precariously stowed on his lap, he never gives his name. I don’t ask for it. Don’t offer mine. We’re waiting for a bus on a street corner in Atlanta. We’ve exhausted wheelchair talk: his is broken down, leaving him to push himself along slanted sidewalks and up steep hills. Mine? I’ve had it almost a year. Yeah, I like it well enough. There is a certain wild avidity in his eyes as he looks it over. I feel a little sad.

But then there is the quacking. And the awareness he is chatting up my fiancée. She trades banter with him pleasantly, though sometimes our eyes surreptitiously meet, acknowledging the weirdness of the moment. I stop talking. In the distance, a bus shambles into view. At last. We’ve been waiting almost an hour.

I’m not surprised when the bus driver leans out, his face marked with naked disgust. He’s perturbed. We’re slowing him down.

“I only have one spot for a wheelchair,” he says, wishing he were anywhere but here. This said, he waits for us to sort it out, draw straws, guess a number.

“What do you mean?” I ask. But I already know.

“I mean the other spot don’t work. The seats won’t raise up out of the way. Y’all have to figure that out for yourself.”

The quacking man gives up his spot almost immediately. But I tell him to wait, don’t surrender so quickly. They have an obligation to be certain their equipment works properly, I tell him. Let them figure it out.

The driver reaches into his pocket, eyeing us, fishing out a cell phone. He turns his back, muttering unhappily, kneeling down, fiddling with a lever that won’t move. He looks back at us over his shoulder. I smile back at him. I’m being wished out of existence. Out of his, at least. I’ve felt it before.

Soon, though, he’s wrenched the seat up, folded it away. We all file on board the bus, and after he’s belted our chairs down, he stomps on the accelerator.

Behind me, my fiancée falls quiet in the din and clatter, but the other man, still at my side, gabs on. I don’t know him, won’t ever see him again, but he doesn’t feel like a stranger. I see him often, his type, his lonely, addled type, and have, for more than twenty years, feared that I could somehow become him someday.

I live in Atlanta now, with my fiancée. The long trek through small-town America that comprised most of my life is over, and there is a wonder at everything a large city provides: public transportation is a marvel, a novelty for me. Attempting to board a train downtown, two throngs converge at the car’s whooshing doors: those exiting, those entering. I want on the train, but no one moves. A man sees me, begins to hector everyone around me.

“Wheelchair coming through,” he announces, politely enough.

His tone is sensible but insistent. He’s ignored. I smile at him, trying to wave him off, wanting no part of it. But he has a mission now.

“Excuse me, wheelchair coming through?” he announces a bit louder. “Come on, y’all! Man. In. A. Wheelchair.”

Still, the cross currents of people pay him no mind. He decides to shout.

“
Respect!
”

Everyone jumps, snapped out of their private thoughts, then steps aside.

In the nursing home in the town I grew up in, where my grandfather is a surly patient, rendered mostly mute by a massive stroke and legless by amputations at his hips, the hallways stink of urine and nothing can change it. I hate to visit him there. This selfishness I confess: when I do go in to see him, I pray to see him sleeping in his bed. Or in no mood for company. The weight of the place is something I can’t bear. Not even in my love for him.

A woman approached me in the hall once, while I waited to see him. Her hair was the color of dark ink, bottle false. She put her hand to my shoulder, leaning in, her wrinkled face a quilt of blotchy makeup.

“Finally,” she cooed. “A good-looking resident around here.”

A nurse pulled her away then. I tried a faltering smile. My face felt like paper devoured by flame. I left without seeing my grandfather.
Another time, another time
, I thought. But not then.

I escaped into the movie theater next door. I didn’t care what was playing. Inside, the air was too cold, but I stayed.

That word scalded me.
Resident
. It was the password to every fear that had been inculcated in me since almost the first day of my paralysis. As much as the injury itself, undue hope can be debilitating: doctors, nurses, therapists work against its onset. I was told I’d never walk again, never feel anything. I would lead a benighted, circumscribed life. That was my challenge: to accept that granite fact.

I was twelve, a boy. Nothing more. Partly this was a gift. A mercy, even amidst the cruelty of stupid luck. Much of it saddened me, but that life, that life in which I was not even a full participant yet, it waited for me. And so it was easy to think of other things, to become an unexpected, unforeseen revision.

Years later, all those fears would return, having never really left, dormant seeds in the body’s memory.

I knew that I would never find love. That no one could ever love me. Whatever I became in life, I was already stamped, fixed. The plasticity of youth gradually became the strictures of adulthood: in the most fundamental ways, I was no different from anyone. And, yet, I was set apart and always would be, and there were days and weeks and maybe even years when I thought there was no way that gap could be bridged.

Except perhaps with words. With writing. I think, looking back, I took to it with a desperation I never really ap
prehended. But with time that desperation didn’t so much grow as it became uncovered, a dark ore to mine.

Someone speaks to me in the grocery store. A voice I don’t quite recognize. I look up and it’s a new neighbor, an architect who designs shopping malls. He’s come here, he says, on his new electric bicycle: a false hip prevents any real exercise. I’m interested, ask questions about its operation: of all the work of the body, all its dalliances and meanderings, most recede from memory. How it felt to shave the green skin of an apple away from itself is foreign now. The dry cool of a stone is, I think, an abstraction, not so much remembered as supposed. But I can still feel in my legs the rhythms of pedaling, the work of balance against the earth, the rise of blisters from abraded flesh. All that is not so distant. It’s yesterday.

I’m not certain he knows that as we talk, and a rude stream of consumers pass by, I’m far away, before the onset of these concerns, these fears.

And now I think that maybe I am beyond them.

We meet in another city. There for a writers’ conference, I trudge back from dinner with friends through heavy rain.
The sidewalks fill up with it. The streets are foam white. Inside the hotel lobby, I say good-bye to my friends. Damp and tired, I want an end to the long day. No more talk. No more words.

Near the elevators, near the bar, I waver: though I want to go to sleep, I decide to look inside, passing through clusters of loud people, laughing, drinking, smiling. I hope to run into a friend. If not, I’ll go to my room, where my mother and her friend Carolyn wait, having traveled with me.

I see two friends seated with others in a long booth against a window, and make my way through the crowd to them. For a few minutes I joke with one of them, glad I’m there no matter my fatigue. Rest is a renewable resource, I tell myself, but the opportunity to be with people who know me often feels rare.
This is why I’m here
, I think.

Then the other friend I had spotted is standing beside me, and with him is a woman I don’t know. Longtime friends from graduate school, they’ve been to a reading and dinner tonight. He introduces us and goes back to his seat, leaving us to talk, though it’s difficult in so much noise. Or it would be, if everyone and everything, all noise, all motion, didn’t grow faint. There is only her.

Slight, with dark hair, eyes which never seem to drift, she is a writer. Instantly, I am awake, entirely certain she’ll discover I’m a fool.

We talk about writing, novelists, poets I should include in a class I’d like to teach someday, an idea which slides about in the back of my mind and never gains much purchase, but as she speaks, as I begin to memorize her chin, her nose and mouth and eyes, an inexplicable focus begins to resolve the blur my life has been for all these years.

Why can’t you be in my life?

We say good-bye after talking a long while, and I rise in the elevator, tired and heavy and sad. Sad that we live long miles apart. Sad that the world won’t shrink. Sad that after all these years I have no idea how to be anything or anyone else.

At my hotel door, I hear the television inside. David Letterman. Loud. My mother and her childhood friend, giggling. I rap the door with my mouth stick. No answer. Another time, harder. No response. I knock my head against the door. I’m in the hallway. All down its length, room service trays gleam on the floor. Everything is still. Our room is a handicapped-accessible unit, with a button beside the door which loudly buzzes and flashes the room’s lights when activated. A modification for the hearing impaired or the blind. I’m tired, confused, stuck here, and no one is in sight.

I press the button. A surprisingly shrill tone buzzes through the door. Inside, I can hear my mother and Carolyn jump up, and the television cuts off.

“Oh, shit,” my mother drawls as Carolyn begins to laugh.

“Is it a fire?” Carolyn asks. “Hell, Paula.”

“All I have to say is,” my mother announces, “I have my pajamas on and I am not going out.”

I mash the button like a car horn before the moment of collision.

“It’s. Me. Paul,” I almost shout into the door. “Your. Son. Knocking. On. The. Door.”

The lock begins to rattle and the door opens. Inside, both women in their pajamas are cackling, a latter-day slumber party.

When I am in bed, and the lights go off, I wait a long while before sleep.

All day long I think of her, unable to say why, or, more truthfully, unable to admit that I have been smitten—in its truest sense, meaning
smite
, meaning I have been struck. I feel the force of it: inexplicable, undeniable. I wander through the hotel speaking to others, but I am thinking of her, saying her name, imagining another life.

That night I see her from a distance. Before I’m aware of it, I’m hurtling down the hallway. Toward her, calling her name, not exactly embarrassed by my lack of reserve, until I’m there.
E-mail me, please
, I say.

Though I can’t stay, late for a poetry reading, when we say good-bye, I feel a part of my past begin to fall away.

At night, the faint percussions of trains rock by in the dark. My body never seems to fully surrender to sleep: one ankle throbs intermittently or a knee twitches its need to be stretched. I wake to little pains. The murmurs of disuse. Nerves signaling out in the distant dreams I never quite remember. Beside me now, mussed by the turns of sleep, her left arm laid across my rising chest, my fiancée dreams. She wears a blue Obama for Change T-shirt. This seems right. Corny, perhaps, but correct in a way I can’t quite articulate. In her sleep she turns, winding the covers around her small frame. Because I can’t hold on to them, I wake to see that I’m uncovered, my feet cold, my chest cold, but I smile, pierced by joy. I press my body, as best as I can, against hers, and there is enough warmth for sleep.

I want to say that every poem I’ve ever written was elegy to this simple moment. A presupposed elegy. Lament for what would never come if only because it had not yet arrived. But it’d be untrue, a fiction with an indulgent streak, veering toward a lie.

Whatever has happened to me, however it has left me, with bones brittled by lack of weight bearing, scars stippling my skin here and there like pale furrows, a fading memory remains of that younger self.

His name is my own, and our eyes are the same in
definite blue. Beyond that, we would hardly recognize one another, I think. We diverged in violence, half dead in the fullness of a summer not unlike this one.

To return to that moment when everything broke apart, when I was lifted up from the ground like the child I was and then lowered back like fragility itself is strange. Every day I am touched by that day’s permanency, its long, dark, deepening shadow. Every day, and yet I hardly ever think back to it. One year, not long ago, I forgot my injury’s anniversary for a week. I had to laugh.

And that is the heart of it: I laughed. The date was no longer a red mark on a dread calendar. Now there were only days. Now there were only months and years in unknowable succession. Now there is only time.

Tonight the sky is littered with an iridescent confetti of fireworks. They flare and rumble, setting unseen dogs to howling, afraid for everything they know their lives are. The falling fire soon runs out, cinders seeding a burned-up world.

And yet we look up, my fiancée and I, half enthralled, half absorbed in the talk we make with a friend. I’m thinking of this book, wondering how to bring it to its close, if not an end. Then I’m thinking of her. Of us.

And that is it.

July 4, 2009
Atlanta, Georgia

That this book ever became more than a file on a hard drive is still a great amazement to me. Without the guidance and support of so many people, I could not have written it.

To my agent, Betsy Lerner, who set this in motion with an unexpected e-mail, I can’t express enough gratitude. Her confidence in this book never wavered, even if mine sometimes did.

To my editor, Lee Boudreaux, who sifted through each meandering draft, I am indebted. Her enthusiasm carried me through bouts of frustration and fear, and her editorial genius saved the book from my mistakes.

To Daniel Halpern, and everyone else at Ecco, my inadequate, abiding thanks.

To family and friends, I owe more than just these words.

I would like to especially thank my parents and my brothers, who have never failed in their support. Also, Eliot Wilson, Mark Womack, Sean Torbett, and Chris Kerley, whose friendship has been a great gift. Also, Rodney Jones, Allison Joseph, Jon Tribble, Lucia Perillo, Ed Brunner, who once were teachers but now are good friends. Thank you, Jonette Larrew, for all your help and friendship. To Adam Turner, my cousin, thank you.

To Uche Nwokocha, my great thanks for your strength and assistance.

To Blas Falconer, Suzanne Frischkorn, Sharon Hayashi, Michael Salman, Reinaldo Román, Alexa Harter, Darby Sanders, Nora Gomez, Libby Gaalaas, Erin Kaczkowski, thank you for your parts in this story.

And to June, without whom this book could not exist, my love.