Paper Lantern: Love Stories (6 page)

By eleven I’d reached the turnoff on Chad’s map and continued down a dirt road. It opened from a papery birch forest into a clearing where a rustic compound stood on the shore of a lake glistening with the rings of feeding fish. I parked and walked by deserted cabins to a log lodge beside the dock. The screen door was ajar, and I went in, past a table stacked with books:
Iron John
,
Fire in the Belly
,
The Myth of Male Power
,
Fatherless America.
Copies of my book
, Welfare
, were for sale along with the others and with the three slim volumes by my friend the Vietnamese poet, who was reading to a circle of maybe seventy men. A couple of the men were perched on wheelchairs; the rest sat Indian-style on the plank floor. Each had a drum the size of a toy beside him. My friend was the only one in the circle wearing a shirt.

No one turned when I slipped in; they were absorbed by the poem. My friend had always been a gently charismatic reader, but he was reciting now with an intensity that reflected that of his audience. After each poem there was a collective exhalation, a moment of respectful silence, and then Chad would invite the men to share personal responses. Several of the poems were elegiac portraits of a once-powerful father who had been reduced by immigrant status and the prejudice of his adopted country to an aged, exhausted man on the periphery of all but his family. The men on the floor shared their stories about fathers and Chad would ask my friend to read another poem.

I stood outside the circle, feeling like an unbeliever at a prayer service. I was scheduled to read after lunch and wondered how I would come up with something appropriate. The few vignettes I’d written about my father, also an immigrant, were at best what Chad might term “conflicted.”

My friend read the title poem of his first book,
Friendly Fire
, an indictment of a criminal American foreign policy simply conveyed in thirty lines about the ghost of his godfather, who had been killed by American fire during the war. When he finished, an older man with a bit of a gut, hirsute, with a silver cast to his ponytail and mustache and a faded
SEMPER FI
tattoo on his chest, raised his hand and asked, “Chad, would this be the right time to share my ghost dance?”

“Could we put that on hold for just a moment, Pete Red Crow?” Chad said. He passed out a shopping bag stuffed with so-called scarlet ribbons that looked like tie-dyed rags. “I want each of you to take as many ribbons as you need and tie them around the places on your body or spirit that have been wounded.” To demonstrate, Chad wrapped a ribbon around what I presumed was a tennis elbow. Men in the circle were winding them around their heads like headbands, around their necks like bandannas, around their chests, their drooping bellies, their legs, ankles, and feet. Later, when I described the scene to a woman I was seeing, she asked, “Did anyone tie one to his wiener?”

“Maybe symbolically,” I said.

“Where did you tie yours?”

“I didn’t take one.”

“Where would you have tied it if you had?”

“That information is to be shared only with the brotherhood.”

The man who wanted to share his ghost dance banded a ribbon around his forehead and knotted one at each wrist, where they hung like streamers. “Is it a good time yet, Chad?” he asked.

“Thank you for waiting, Pete,” Chad said.

Pete rose, bowed to the circle, raised his scarlet-trailing arms in salute to Chad, to the poet, to the sky above the rafters, and, chanting in a tongue that sounded like Hollywood Indian, he began to gyrate and stamp, twisting while his arms milled and waved and the ribbons swirled as if slashed wrists were spouting loops of arterial light. He stopped abruptly, and without a bow folded back into his seated position, buried his face in his hands, and wept.

“It’s all right, Pete Red Crow. That came from a release deep within,” Chad said. His instinct was right: something needed to be said. Hands shot up from men who had more to share. Chad sensed the mood-shift, and thought that it might be wise to calm things down while he still had control of the group. “It’s time to break for lunch,” he said. “We’ll pick up where we left off when we reassemble. But first let us thank our brother Thanh, a true keeper of the poetic flame, who has graced us with the gifts of purifying fire, solace, and wisdom.”

The men heartily applauded, but then a bearded man in a wheelchair festooned with ribbons raised his hand and said, “Chad, I don’t think thanks is enough. We need a raising up.”

Ever since Chad had introduced the ribbons, my friend had watched the proceedings with an increasingly quizzical expression. He’d let the ribbons pass him by and seemed utterly bewildered by the dance and the weeping that followed. I suspected that he’d agreed to the conference with no idea as to what the Men’s Movement was about. As the men in the circle began to drum and then rose and pressed in on him, a sudden fear flashed in his eyes and he shouted, “I have bad knees!” The circle collapsed in on him and he disappeared beneath a scrum of half-naked bodies. I could hear them whispering, “You are my brother, Thanh … you have touched my heart … you have touched my soul.” Then, borne by their uplifted hands, he seemed to levitate above us. Around each knee a red ribbon had been tied into a bow.

*   *   *

Essays on the conspicuous theme of wounds in Hemingway are common, but so far as I know, there’s only that one essay about waiting. And once it is pointed out, you see it everywhere. There’s the cynical Italian major of “In Another Country,” a noted fencer who endures the futile rehabilitation of his mutilated hand. There are stories that are studies in the word
pati
, to suffer—the root in both
patient
and
patience
—like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which an old waiter prays,
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …

Even as a young writer, Hemingway had a knack for portraying old men, not unlike certain actors who make a career of it—Hal Holbrook doing Twain—though I doubt that even Holbrook could play an aging Papa better than Hemingway played himself. It’s fitting that
The Old Man and the Sea
got him the Nobel Prize. That book is about waiting, too, but then what fishing story isn’t?
Moby-Dick
is waiting sustained over a thrashing sea of pages. That’s the problem with the insight about waiting: you have to ask, Why single out Hemingway? Think of waiting as measured by the interminable winters in Chekhov, or by the ticking of clocks in bureaucratic offices at the dead ends of the maze of cobbled streets in Kafka’s Prague. Prague, one of those cities that like London is presided over by a clock.

Limiting the catalogue to just a sample of the writers overlapping Hemingway’s time, there’s Gatsby’s green dock light waiting in darkness and Newland Archer in Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence
, longing for another woman during twenty-five years of loveless marriage;
Winesburg, Ohio
, a masterpiece about waiting, an entire community stranded in the stasis of secret lives, yearning for something mysterious and unsayable beneath the cover of night; Joyce’s
Dubliners
, with its phantasmal patron saint of waiting, the tubercular Michael Furey of “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield’s heroines waiting for their lives to begin; the passengers on Katherine Anne Porter’s
Ship of Fools,
waiting for their baggage-ridden lives to change as they voyage into eternity; Beckett’s tramps; Faulkner’s devotion to the word
endure
—to suffer patiently, to continue to exist. All these writers, who we think are looking toward us into the present, are actually gazing back.

From that perspective it is as if the forward thrust of narrative, as if the very action of verbs, is illusory, that no matter what the story or how it’s told or by whom, the inescapable conclusion is that life—not just life on the page but life at its core—waits. It waits stalled in traffic, doing time at red lights, waits in line for the coffee that signals the beginning of another day, waits for the messages of the day to arrive. Sometimes the wait is imperceptible, but it can also seem interminable—waiting for a phone call from a lover or from the doctor who may pause before delivering what feels more like a sentence than a diagnosis, the kind of call in which the undecided seems suddenly to have been decided long before, as if it’s no accident that in the mystical, kabbalistic workings of language,
fate
and
wait
are paired in rhyme.

I don’t remember if that essay on waiting mentioned Ketchum, Idaho, on the morning of July 2, 1961. It didn’t have to. Whether a public gesture such as Yukio Mishima’s seppuku, or a private exit—Virginia Woolf, her pockets filled with stones, sinking into the River Ouse—a writer’s suicide becomes the climax of a reality that the reader appends to a lifework of fiction. It has certainly become the final punctuation for Hemingway, an author who traded the typewriter he referred to as his psychoanalyst for a shotgun. Playing analyst, literary critics wrote that his suicide had been lying in wait since 1928 when Hemingway’s father, Clarence, a doctor, shot himself at the family home in Oak Park, Illinois, with a Civil War pistol passed down from his father.

In “Indian Camp,” an early story, the father, a doctor, while on a fishing trip to Michigan, performs a C-section with a jackknife and tapered gut leaders on an Indian woman who has been in labor for two days. The story is set not all that far from where I rented that cottage up in Michigan, although any trace of Native Americans, Ojibwa probably, is gone. The Indian woman’s husband can’t endure the suffering and cuts his own throat. Afterward, Nick, the boy who has witnessed both the birth and the suicide, asks his father, “Is dying hard, Daddy?”

“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

The story ends:
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure he would never die.

*   *   *

The woman, Liesel—she went by Lise—who wanted to know where on my body I would choose a wound to bind, despised Hemingway. She despised the popular legends about him and the values they represented, despised bullfights and braggarts who spent their considerable disposable income on shooting animals in Africa, despised what she called the Arrested He-Man School of American Fiction. When I suggested that Hemingway deserved his unfashionable reputation, but still, he had written some genuinely original stories that continued to influence writers even if they didn’t acknowledge it, Lise told me she preferred stories that reached for a transformative epiphany to those that settled for irony. I don’t know how much of Hemingway’s work she’d actually read. She revered Dawn Powell, a writer who like Lise had fled a small town in central Ohio for the city. I recall a conversation we had that prompted me to say that Hemingway had referred to Powell as his favorite living writer, and there was another time, on the night we met, when I quoted a Hemingway phrase about how grappa took the enamel off your teeth and left it on the roof of your mouth, and she laughed. Otherwise Hemingway wasn’t a writer we discussed much, let alone argued about. I wasn’t going to defend a guy rich enough for safari vacations beating his chest for shooting the last of the lions.

Lise took her literature seriously, although she’d probably say not seriously enough. She was a self-described ABD—All But Dissertation—initials she likened to those indicating a disease, or a social stigma like a welfare mother on ADC. She was kidding, but before I caught myself, the comparison between an ADC mother and an ABD from the University of Chicago reminded me of the lack of proportion in those few poems by Sylvia Plath that used Holocaust imagery to convey the pain of a young woman from Smith.

“Actually, ABD
is
a minor epidemic at the U of C,” Lise said. “There should be a graveyard in old Stagg Stadium, not under the stands where the atom bomb was hatched, but right out on the playing field where Jay Berwanger dodged tackles, little crosses marking all the dissertations that suffered and died there.”

Her unfinished dissertation was titled
One City, One Love: Endless Becoming in the Work of Dawn Powell.
Its three-hundred-plus pages awaited completion behind a closed door in a sewing room she called Limbo in the apartment she rented over a dry cleaner in Hyde Park. To pay the rent, Lise augmented a small trust fund by teaching freshman comp at a couple of community colleges in the Chicago area. One was near Arlington, and sometimes, when I’d drive in from Michigan to see her, we’d meet at the Thoroughbred track there. Our first time at the races we won big—for us, anyway—$687 on a horse we couldn’t not bet on named Epiphany. The following night at a French restaurant overlooking an illuminated Lake Shore Drive, we blew our winnings on a four-course meal washed down with a magnum of a champagne from a village fittingly called Bouzy. After the waiter had ceremoniously buried the empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, Lise said, “You have to promise we’ll run away to Bouzy together.” She pronounced it
boozy.

“Tonight?” I asked, checking my watch.

“Tonight’s too late, Jack. It’s already tomorrow in France,” she said, and then, leaning in to be kissed, knocked over the flute with the last of her wine.

Lise was a self-described “promiscuous kisser,” though that didn’t keep her from regarding a kiss as deeply intimate—especially, she added, if it’s my tits being kissed. After a few drinks, she had a way of releasing from a kiss with her mouth still open, shaped as if the kiss continued, a facial expression that her good looks allowed her to get away with, as they allowed her to get away with sounding a little breathless on the subject of sex. The restaurant was closing, the chefs, sans toques, leaned in the doorway of the kitchen, drinking red wine and watching what Lise called our PDAs. We joked that night about calling it quits as high rollers while we were ahead, but over the racing season we returned to the track in Arlington hoping for another score. This time we’d invest in tickets to Bouzy.