The Other (30 page)

I saw Rand Barry on the first Saturday in May about fifteen years ago, the first Saturday in May being the opening day of boating season in Seattle, which is annually celebrated with a nautical parade. I was in a rental canoe with Jamie and the boys, all of us in lifejackets, holding water a little east of the Montlake Cut so we could watch the sailboats and yachts go by, when, at close quarters, Rand cruised past at the helm of a
Cornucopia III,
with a man and two women in the cockpit behind him, all possibly in their sixties, all holding highball glasses and wearing visors. The boat’s chrome-plated rails shone, and on a halyard overhead an American flag rippled. The trio in the cockpit looked bored but festive. Rand had grown his silver hair longer but still wore his Buddy Holly glasses, and still had the slightly precarious posture, a little like a heron’s, that suggested trouble with his center of gravity. He held his glass with exaggerated care, elbow thrown out, like someone at an English garden party, and while I watched he turned to look at the other man on board, who gave him a sort of general thumbs-up, as if to say that their voyage was successful, which Rand acknowledged by raising his glass and regaling the parade of boats with his foghorn. There were answers all up and down the column. There was a minute-long consensus of foghorns. The boredom in the cockpit of the
Cornucopia III
briefly lifted as the members of the party enjoyed the cacophony and, I could see, Rand’s role in inciting it. Rand brought his glass to his lips, drank, and then ate what might have been a corn chip.

“Rand—your son’s dead in a cave on the South Fork of the Hoh!”—I didn’t yell that across the few yards of Lake Washington separating us as the
Cornucopia III
motored past. I was a father myself now and felt bad for anyone whose child had disappeared without explanation, but still not a word escaped from my mouth. We paddled into Lake Union and beached our canoe at Gas Works Park so our boys could play on the old machinery, eat sandwiches, and fly the kites we’d brought. I sat on the hill with Jamie, watching, and told her that I’d just seen John William’s father, and asked her what she thought I should do, if anything, which was a question I’d put to her many times before, and to which I already knew her answer. Sure enough, Jamie said, “I’ve told you a hundred times what I think,” “You’ve made it clear it isn’t up to me,” and “I’ve learned to live with how I feel about it.”

Two years ago this month, I climbed Mount Anderson with an English Department colleague—a dyed-in-the-wool classicist—who enjoys that sort of thing. We’re good friends, close enough to speak intimately, and together we outlasted four principals, two remodels, and three strikes. On the summit of Mount Anderson, my colleague the classicist took pictures and a nap while I gazed down on the Linsley Glacier, where John William and I had passed a night in a snow hut, smoking hash and eating candy bars while sitting on our packs, in ’72. And again I wanted to say something, and thought I might to this colleague, because he’s such a trustworthy friend; but, as always, no words came, and he and I stumbled down the mountain, walked out to the trailhead on wobbly legs, and drove to Port Townsend for a celebratory dinner of Stella Artois and panini.

I also went up to the Valhallas once, with two mountaineering friends who shared my interest in those peaks. We passed our first night at Camp Stick-in-the-Eye, not far from where, years before, I’d disconsolately read Eliot by flashlight. I wanted to tell these friends everything. I imagined showing them the cave, but instead we made camp in a high, damp meadow and climbed as many spires and pinnacles as we had time for, and slid around in chutes full of scree, and sat under the stars late at night arguing about politics and talking, as I recall, about lightweight hiking equipment. These were two guys I’d met through the Mountaineers who were not too serious about technical climbing and whose company I enjoyed, but, still, I didn’t tell them how much time I’d spent in this region, or why or how I’d spent it, and, the last I heard, one of them had rheumatoid arthritis and was no longer hiking, and the other had moved to Phoenix.

There was a time when we had a membership at the Pacific Science Center. It was cheaper that way to take our sons to the exhibits, the Planetarium, the IMAX movies, the Tropical Butterfly House, and the laser shows. We’ve seen robotic dinosaurs, played virtual soccer, posed at the Shadow Wall, tested our hand-eye coordination, and eaten lunch at the Fountain Café and in the Brown Bag Court. I would say that, a dozen times over the years, Jamie and I shelled out pennies and nickels and watched the boys make wishes before they tossed their coins into the pools. When I told Jamie about the harvesting I’d done there, in these same pools, with John William, she laughed and then, with no warning, hit me in the solar plexus.

We took the boys to Fort Clatsop once, years ago, between Christmas and New Year’s, to see where the Lewis and Clark Expedition had overwintered at the western terminus of their slog. “Fort” seemed very much the wrong word for the modest, palisaded hovels replicated there by the National Park Service, but we were able, despite that, to glean a little of the feeling of a winter in those woods under duress. A volunteer dressed in period clothes demonstrated the firing of a powder musket, which made an unimpressive bang and left a singed smell in the air. Then our sons tried writing their names with quill pens, and started fires, or tried to start fires, with flint, steel, and char cloth. Of course, during all of this I thought of John William. The candle-making demonstration and the short course on tanning hides hit me, that day, with all the force of bad dreams. Afterward, we drove to Tillamook, toured the cheese plant, and ate ice cream from waffle cones at a table outside the souvenir shop. I took comfort in this—when the boys were young, I took comfort in them because they gave my life a shape. So it was discomfiting to see them reach and then surpass the age at which I met John William. I had to collect the boys once, a few years back, after they’d gone out to Kalaloch with two friends, one of whom had managed to roll his pickup into a ditch. All four of them looked hungover when I arrived on the scene. It made me think of getting lost in the North Cascades in ’72.

Before they were married, Wiley and Erin decided to climb Mount Rainier. Wiley insisted on a “shakedown cruise” with his equipment, and since he was eager to see the rain forest, we hiked up the main fork of the Hoh together while Jamie and Erin went to Portland. On the trail, I heard about Wiley’s first marriage, which technically wasn’t over, and about his children, a girl and a boy, who lived with their mother in Georgetown. “Why would I ever want to be the cause of someone else’s pain?” Wiley said, meaning his kids, but he was also of the opinion that the woman still technically his wife was a “horrendously poor listener who deserved what she was going through.” I wanted to say, “Over that ridge, on the other side of the river, my friend lies dead in a cave, Wiley,” partly because we were there, and partly because it’s hard to keep a secret like that when someone else has let his guard down the way Wiley had let down his. But in the end, and maybe ridiculously, there was that oath over swapped blood, and so, instead of mentioning John William, I asked Wiley how old his kids were.

The closest I came to breaking my pact with John William was in Room 104 during Modern English Literature. I’d moved things along that quarter so as to leave time for stories by Frank O’Connor and Alan Sillitoe, and so we read “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” and came to the paragraph where Sillitoe writes, from the point of view of a reform-school boy in a long-distance race:

I could just see the corner of the fenced-up copse in front where the only man I had to pass to win the race was going all out to gain the half-way mark. Then he turned into a tongue of trees and bushes where I couldn’t see him anymore, and I couldn’t see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me.

And, of course, this made me think of John William, which I told my students for no good reason. I told them that I had raced like this myself, with something like that kind of loneliness, against a boy from Lakeside who subsequently became my friend. I said we’d found a hot spring in the mountains and made a blood pact not to reveal its location. They looked at me as if wondering whether this digression had a point, and so I read Sillitoe’s passage aloud a second time, and we pondered it together. One student thought Sillitoe was interested in “the terror at the heart of nature” another thought Sillitoe was telling the reader “that once you see the truth about things there’s no turning back.” This latter emerged as the interpretation of choice. We added the English castes to the mix. I told them about the “Angry Young Men.” Someone, naturally, brought up Camus. I miss having conversations like this with teen-agers—I’m done teaching now; it’s summer and I won’t be going back—but it would be better if a teacher didn’t have so many papers to correct. It’s the papers that make teachers think twice.

I
WAS AT
S
HOREY’S.
Shorey’s had moved to Fremont and wasn’t the same, but the booksellers there were as moody, impolitic, and distracted as ever, and still made a point of not noticing anybody. A coffeehouse had been attached, with a stained-glass window and an antique couch, so now the line between book browsing and coffee drinking was blurred—I would see someone standing in front of a bookshelf with an espresso, and it would break the spell I was under. But no matter. My zeal for the esoteric author and the strange title remained intact. And I still enjoyed the unraveling of purpose I felt around decrepit volumes. But my keenest enthusiasm was for little-known poets. Their chapbooks, limited editions, and self-published pamphlets held promise. I thought I might find something unappreciated but inspired on a page I hadn’t looked at yet. And so, on this day in ’98, at about the time when the lead news story concerned impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, I was in a book-lined cubbyhole at Shorey’s, hopefully perusing a collection called
Chronic Obsessions
by a poet named Robert Leventhal. It had been self-published, on excellent paper, in ’74. It was noted, in the back, that
Chronic Obsessions
was a letterpress printed in a limited edition of 250 copies. Fifty copies had been bound in cloth and boards.

Robert Leventhal didn’t suffer from the fatal flaw of many poets, which is a surfeit of self-regard. His trick was to write in the persona of a woman whose sensuality was tinged with sadomasochism, so that for the reader—or for this reader—the thought of a Robert Leventhal behind the words was an invitation to distress. I read his first poem and felt provoked, I would say, by this sense of an alter ego at work, or of someone obfuscating. On the other hand, I imagined Leventhal arguing that provocation was his purpose, and I pictured him as an academic, rail-thin, with a three-day growth of beard and a morose lecturing style. In “Santa Fe Interregnum” he wrote:

I made the journey to Santa Fe.

There I followed the sisterly example and observed complete celibacy

But could not hold to this and became a painter of landscapes.

In the sun I took a hirsute lover.

I scourged him with nettles and dug in my nails.

In return, he abused me.

And so we made love to our shadows each morning

In transcendent light. Hairy kundalini satyr invented by Eros—

I called him this and other names with

Twenty layers of irony. Soon we walked on our

Hands to Taos. I painted nude men with diminutive

Cocks while they appeared at odds with themselves.

That moment when the guilt cult of Thanatos

Could be seen in their faces—I tried to catch this

After midnight. As it turned out my Theravadan was

A happy bisexual. He thought I was a beguiling creature from

Wealthy Corinth. But I had been impregnated by the

Errant seed of Encolpius, and as I swelled, my satyr enjoyed

Me up into my sternum while urgent to touch the

Growing alien. That I was carrying someone else’s

Genetic complement made my lover

Insane with pleasure. I painted my

History for his benefit and because, as he said,

It was part of his metaphysics. It was my life before

Santa Fe he wanted to possess while dabbling in

Tantra. This lover put an ear to my pubis and listened to

My parasite while I told him how Priapus had struck,

At 3 a.m., with no advance warning,

In the form of bladder-blocking semi-tumescence.

How after five seconds of missionary enthusiasm it was

Over, except for our separate trips to the

Gabinetto,
where I earnestly failed to douche free

His seed. And so I am with child while my lover

Knives me. It’s wonderfully strange.

Sitting on a stool in my cubbyhole at Shorey’s, reading this Robert Leventhal poem written in the voice of a pregnant Southwest landscape painter, was like seeing Norman Bates as his mother near the end of
Psycho.
The wig falls off and the dress falls open, and then, after a psychiatrist explains Norman’s warped psychology, his dual personalities, we see him in a chair with a blanket on his shoulders, talking to himself in his mother’s voice.