The Narrow Door (19 page)

After my session, I take the train down to Asbury Park, where I meet my brother Michael and his family, who are up from Baltimore for a few days. My father, to my surprise, is with them. They don’t know how relieved I am to see them up ahead on Cookman Avenue, as I walk toward downtown from the train station. I already know this will be a good day. So many good days lately, all of which have involved the sea. Maybe it is simply the horizon line that helps me relax, the sense of perspective that opens up the mind. Or all that movement, the active sea: the opposite of stasis. It might be what we can’t see, all that hidden life, crawling, shredding, floating, flying, one thing eating another thing—all these things and more, not to mention the wonderful salt smell, the ions released into the air, energizing not just the people, but the plants and birds and insects.

In a little while the five of us sit at an outdoor café on the boardwalk, the same place Braunwyn had taken me not two weeks before. The lunch is good. Our talk is easy. We’re waiting for the check to arrive when a pigeon steps up to the table. He is an especially handsome pigeon, which makes me wonder why humans often treat pigeons like crap, carriers of filth and mites and disease. Jordan, my eleven-year-old niece, stands, stomps at the pigeon. I say,
Jordan, don’t.
I’m startled that these words have come out of my mouth. When have I last said “no,” “stop it,” or “enough” to anyone, much less to my niece? And for a moment time swells as if I slip into a slow-motion movie of myself. I watch myself and see myself shrink to a focused bead of light.

But once I say no, Jordan looks. I look. We talk about the pigeon. We talk about the iridescent green of his throat, the violet shield around that patch, the rich red feet, bright as cinnamon chewing gum. We take note of the bands around his feet (feet? do pigeons even have feet?) and then the waitress comes out to say,
That’s Walter, he’s a homing pigeon. He’s made his home here. Isn’t he beautiful?
And all eyes turn to Walter, who steps not one inch from my foot, unafraid. He puts his beak down to a board, raises his head, puts his beak down again. I don’t think I’m lying when I say just for that moment Walter turns to light.

At some point during the next day, Braunwyn asks me, “What do you want of a relationship? What excites you?”

It’s a bit of a shock that I’m mute in the face of that question.

2010 | 
I can’t exactly say what drives me to church one Saturday. Well, maybe I can, but of all the things I could do to find solace, it might not be the wisest choice. I’ve always been drawn to the liturgy—in my teens and twenties I even wrote and published church music—in spite of my exasperation with the hierarchy. I haven’t gone to church by myself since my twenties, and as I walk inside and slip into a pew, I think,
okay, I’m home.
Whenever I’m with someone else, say, for midnight mass or a funeral, I usually feel some inexplicable loss, a loss I can’t quite explain. But not this time. Maybe it helps that the church is a progressive church, many gay and lesbian parishioners, people of all ages and nationalities. Think of it as a Unitarian church, but with communion.

I’m usually not so big on homilies. I usually think of that as the time when the presider makes meaningless sounds in order to fill up some space: time to look at the song sheet. But today is different. The priest is talking about hospitality—what does it mean to welcome the people we love? I’m thinking about that, my arms outstretched on the back of the pew, when a phrase of his jumps out at me.
The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom.
I am riveted. He says it once more, as if he wants it to sink in:
The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom.
What on earth could such a thing mean?

Later that night M tells me about a white dog showing up at a friend’s house. The friend looked at the dog’s tags; the address was three miles away, all the way on the other side of town. There had been fireworks that night, extravagant fireworks, and it was likely that the dog had run across woods, marshes, highways to get to the friend’s house. The friend looked out the door and saw what she thought was a white deer. But it wasn’t any white deer. It was a dog, a wet white dog, who walked right into her living room and dining room, muddy paws and all. The dog looked around a bit, submitted to the friend’s petting, then slumped, turned on his side, and fell asleep.

The friend called the numbers on the dog’s tags. No one answered at the numbers. The friend left a message, and when she didn’t hear back after a while, she started to get suspicious. Maybe the dog was hers, the mystery beast coming up the street in the dark, out of the briars, the woods.

The next day the phone rang. A terse, gruff boy on the line, and the story comes darker, clearer. The dog’s human, his protector, his mother, drowned in the pool the night before. Did the dog see it happen? Did the dog jump in the water after her, try to rescue her? Was it a suicide, a heart attack, a slip off the side while she was heading back into the house with an armful of dry clothes? The friend didn’t feel she had the right to such questions, but she did ask the boy—the woman’s daughter’s boyfriend—if he’d be willing to let the dog stay with her for a while. “He seems so comfortable here,” she said. And the boy agreed to that, if reluctantly. And who could blame the friend if she started to make plans, if she thought about driving to the store for dog food. Life with the white dog, the white deer—impossible not to be relieved that she had a reason to keep herself from going so many places. A root in her midst. Finally, after so much running around.

I suppose I don’t need to say that the family wanted the dog back the next day. Or say that the friend was inconsolable, as the dog jumped in the back of the family’s car, so grateful to be back with his familiars. Of course his mother wouldn’t be there at the house when he jumped out of the car, but he didn’t know that yet. And all the losses of the friend rose up before her like ghosts turning to flesh, needing to be dealt with.

2008 | 
I write, but my messages aren’t answered. I call, but voice mails aren’t returned. I know, of course, that Denise is dealing with bigger things than my need to know about her health. I have the beginning of the school term to occupy myself with anyway. Maybe I am a better teacher for fully occupying myself. The students write good work, not just good sentences, but work they give themselves over to. We talk plenty about David Foster Wallace, whose suicide hovers around the edges of our conversations. We talk about a statement of his that I put on a worksheet: “The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh, how
banal
.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.” We finish one class by reading a passage from
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
, and we talk for a long time about the exactness of its descriptions, its vulnerability and wit, its refusal of the
known.

A bleached sweet salt, a flower of chemical petals.

Also during that silence, Hurricane David hits Galveston, a place M and I know well from our years in Houston. The downtown, on the bay side of the island, is practically wiped out: saltwater, sewage, petroleum, and mud rising all the way to the second-floor level. On the ocean side, the Balinese Room, a great artifact of mid century kitsch, half-Mob hideaway, half-Polynesian fantasy, is gone. Tiki torches, thatch roofs. Even the footings are gone, though for the next two high tides, we hear reports of its boards smashing the concrete seawall until they wash out to sea for good.

In lieu of speaking to Denise, I make her a mixtape. I spend a lot of time on the project. Every song must be right, not just the songs themselves but the order. I try dozens of versions until I find a sequence I can settle on. I print out a cover, I put it in a padded envelope, address it, take it to the Old Chelsea Station post office. I walk back down Seventh Avenue and look directly ahead, aware of other pedestrians moving to my right and left. I might as well be hurling it off the top of one of the buildings, but maybe a wind will catch it and it will sail to where it needs to be.

The arc of the disc doesn’t promise hope where there might be no hope; the first is about setting out, the last about an ending. The songs aren’t easy. They’re all volatile, explosive, expressive, melodic. They’re full of harmonic surprises. There’s no neutrality, no sense that romance is anything but a life-and-death proposition. They don’t step lightly in the world; they’re not afraid of leaving a mark on wet concrete, or turning off the listener with the force of personality. They don’t want to sound like other people. They say yes and yes and yes to love, in spite of all the evidence against it: the compromises that should have never begun, the failures of communication, the disappointment surely to come, in spite of good intentions.

2010 | 
No, no
, I say to M. No, not just about one thing, but about another and yet another. The anger twists his face. It is hard to see that face, as that face has never shown itself to me before. It is a complete stranger to the face that has made pancakes for breakfast, or tried to start the lawnmower on a hot day in August. That face leaves the apartment after I tell that face I love it very much, which makes me think, why did you say that? Such words only translate to: look at me, I am strong and radiant and superior in the light of your rage. I patronize. But lines need to be drawn, agreements need to be made, as much as we say we hate boundaries, borders, walls. A text comes not five minutes after he’s walked out the door.
I’m sorry to leave on bad terms. Yes, arguments are good, we need to learn how to fight better.

When he gets back, I say I want to live in the apartment for the summer; he can live in Springs. I don’t want to take care of elaborate gardens, enough work for three men. It’s enough for me to keep the apartment in decent shape: that is my goal. To wash every cup after it’s been used for coffee. To fold every shirt once it’s been taken out of the dryer. To vacuum the floors every other day, to buy sunflowers (with yellow centers, not brown) for the coffee table. I am giving myself over to guarding and keeping the apartment, and in doing that I am making it my own. I am saying, this is mine, though I don’t have the money to pay for it.

The thing is this: we’ve ended up in a life that requires money, serious money. M makes the money, I make far less of it. M pays nearly all the bills—sometimes I pay electric, sometimes I pay maintenance. I’ve never liked the way this felt. For years I’ve tried to become better known, to write the big novel that gets big reviews, big sales, big money. I’ve written the novel, but no editor has made an offer on it. The rejections are appreciative, respectful. They say the writing is beautiful—and yet? “Quiet” is the word that’s most often used. Quiet? I’ll give them fucking quiet. No one knows how much this situation is scraping me out from inside. It’s killing me. Not even M knows how much it’s doing me in. To admit it to him would be to admit to weakness, a side of myself I’m ashamed of, that I think of as less than masculine. I cannot bear to think of myself as less than masculine, as subordinate, even though that hasn’t stopped me from making choices, in all sorts of situations, that have inevitably put me in a subordinate position.

The big book is published finally, in a smaller, concentrated form, by an indie press. There is no big advance. By this point in time, big advances, much less advances at all, are a thing of the past. All I have is my adjunct salary. But to make more than that, as a tenure-track professor of creative writing, I’d have to move away from New York, away from M.

In my dream that night, writer number 1 is standing on the edge of a little theater, getting ready to present his one-person show on the life of Walt Whitman. The audience is dense with people I know, people from my past, old students, people from Provincetown. The show begins, and writer number 1 merely goes through the motions, as if nothing could be more honorable: to half-believe in a project and still harness the energy to walk it through. In that way, Walt Whitman is a little like the ambient noise that filters in from the sidewalks outside. But one line does leap free from the braided nest of half-believed words:
Walt Whitman is not who we thought he was but the single shining entity.

Writer number 2, who’s sitting in the front row, will have none of it. None of the glibness, none of the complacency, none of the relaxed attitude toward language itself. He sits in his chair for a little bit, trying to see if he can take any more, but he can’t. He knows only hooey is ahead, so he twists to his feet mid performance and heads toward the back, if only to show the others that Walt Whitman is not the single, shining entity but fractured and dazzling. The people in the theater watch in wonder as writer number 1 steps off the stage. Writer number 2 is certain that writer number 1 comes toward him to see what’s wrong, but just as writer number 2 begins to offer his apology, writer number 1 breezes by him. He walks to the exit. He slips inside the men’s room, where he sprinkles white powder on the edge of the program—one sniff, two—as his mind flares, comes to life again. As for the audience: the audience is simply waiting for the show to resume. They’ve already grown bored and know that what they’ve seen has nothing much to do with Walt Whitman.

After our fight, I send some lines from “Song of Myself” to my Beloved. I’m not even sure why I rest on these lines and not others, but I can see they’re about looking beyond the fence of self. And isn’t the fence of self the thing we’ll need to dismantle if we’re going to get anywhere, if anyone’s to make contact again?