The Other (40 page)

“I thought you were at school.”

“Which school did they tell you?”

“He went to Barnard.”

“Who went to Barnard?”

“Guy Benedetti,” answered Ginnie.

I put my elbows on the table and leaned on them, toward her. “Mrs. Barry,” I said. “I’m Neil Countryman, John William’s friend.”

“I know who you are.”

“I knew him in high school.”

“At Barnard he had herpes.”

“I knew him in the seventies.”

“It was Broadway and West End.”

“I knew him in Seattle thirty years ago.”

An orderly checked on Ginnie. I said we were fine. Ginnie said, “She’s Ethiopian. Her parents live in Gondar.”

She ate for a while. Then she said, “Don’t you dare think I’m stupid.”

“No.”

“Or let me give you the Freudian retort. It was forever the queen’s gambit declined, make a note of it. Or the trapper trapped. Or thrust and counterthrust. It was very much the naked queen’s defense. Why don’t you cruelly repeat that?”

She opened wide her mouth, so that I would see the carrot mush inside. There was a quality of flagrant insult to this. I waited until she was done with that, and then I said, “What I came to say is that I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t have seduced me.”

“I really hope you understand that I’m sorry.”

“Satyr.”

“I should have said something, Mrs. Barry. A long time ago.”

She lifted her fork as if to strike me with it. As my friend the classicist had observed: quintessential harridan. It occurred to me that she might live for a long time, that her breath didn’t want to leave her lungs, and that she was afraid.

She said, “Dr. Spock encouraged bedtime reading.”

“Do you understand me?”

“Your generation is awful,” she sneered. “You used to call me your Seattle box-house baby. Don’t you remember that?”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Let’s not pretend.”

I gave up. She ate some macaroni. She said, “You remind me of an egret. A perfect egret. You have a pointed breastbone. I ought to trim your wings.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I apologize. I should have told you.”

“You should have paid,” she said.

I took Robert Leventhal’s
Chronic Obsessions
from a bag at my feet and turned it toward her so she could read the title and look at the line drawing, on the cover, of a woman’s naked, headless torso. “I brought you this,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

Ginnie put her fork down and, turning her head to one side, touched her hair lightly. I said, “‘Alki, 1851.’ On the wall of your study. In Laurelhurst.”

“Don’t you dare think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I thought you might like to have this copy, in case you don’t have one anymore.”

“You’re a shadow,” hissed Ginnie. “You’re his shadow. Get
out.
”

“I’m sorry,” I said, one more time.

Some very credible people believe that everything important happens to you before you’re six years old, but who knows? There are things lost to history with no eyewitnesses, and there are also the unjustly accused. To put this another way,
Chronic Obsessions
might not mean anything, and Rand might be lying. Or maybe the truth is that truth is too complicated. If I extrapolate from myself, there’s a lot of deceit in the world without a beginning, middle, or end. The way it really works, a lot of the time, is that you suffer from the weight of what happened, from what you said and did, so you lie as therapy. Now the story you make up starts to take up space otherwise reserved for reality. For phenomena you substitute epiphenomena. Skew becomes ascendant. The secondary becomes primary. When it’s time to confess, you don’t know what you’re saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It’s even possible to pretend, eventually, that the question wasn’t asked. You’ve been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you’re someone else. Your
you
is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. Is this what some sutras by Buddhists are about? Maybe. The book-length bromides on mental health? At times. The biographies on politicians? Take Nixon or Clinton. Anyway, I don’t know anything about Rand or Ginnie. I don’t know if anyone tried to strangle John William. I don’t really know who tormented whom, or why, or if anyone was even tormented at all. I don’t even know much about myself. I only know that Ginnie protested with
Chronic Obsessions
pressed against her bibbed chest. Then she kicked me out. That was it for me at Harbor House. As I was walking away, she said to my back, “If only you knew the first thing about torment! I was born in the wrong place and time! I was trapped!”

J
AMIE AND
I
TURNED IN
the ’92 Civic and bought a hybrid, which we recently took to the Canadian Okanagan—the Napa of the North that Wiley and Erin told us about. We walked, swam, biked, sunned, tasted wines, ate well, bought pottery, and watched the sun go down, and though all of this was fun, none of it made us happy. We both wanted something else that was unnamable. It might be forever unnamable. In this regard, money changes nothing, which Jamie and I knew before we had it.

When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I’m glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain—even with all this cash on hand—in a way I seem to have no choice about. I’m a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.

T
ODAY
I
WENT
to a used-book store on Admiral Way. It’s crammed, because its owner recently closed a second shop, in Greenwood, and consolidated the collections. Half the titles are in boxes, and these boxes are everywhere, one on top of the next, which frustrates me, since I can’t look into them. Still, one thing I like about having money is that I feel looser in a used-book store. I’ll buy a title just so I can look at it more closely before giving it away. For example, I recently bought
Cocktail Shakers, Lava Lamps, and Tupperware
for $6.98. I wouldn’t have done that before. Too much of an indulgence. In fact, I’m now struggling with a tendency to collect. It’s been liberated by money. I bought a first-edition hardcover, in good condition, of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
for $39.98, which is absurd. Why did I need to have it? I’ve been looking at it lately, though, since Spock was influential. His points of wisdom and advice are numbered 1 through 805:

1. You know more than you think you do.

2. Parents Are Human—They have needs.

3. Some children are a lot more difficult than others.

4. At best, there’s a lot of hard work and deprivation.

5. Needless self-sacrifice sours everybody.

6. Parents should expect something from their children.

7. Parents are bound to get cross.

And so on, to the final line of the book, which is “It’s not the words but the music that counts.”

My purchases are piling up now.
Literary Hills of San Francisco. The Rights of Hospital Patients. Jesus and the Lost Goddess. The Travels of Lao Ts’an. Poems by Ko Un. The Drama of the Gifted Child. Boeing in Peace and War. Taking Stock: A True Tale of Seattle’s Investment Community.
Back issues of
The Mountaineer.
Back issues of
Popular Mechanics.
They all wait for me, and I’ll never get to most of them. I read somewhere recently that there are at least thirty-two million different books in the world, and that most are out of print. The ones that aren’t are read by a very small percentage of the world’s population. Most people have never heard of most authors, much less read them. Golden ages of literature have come and gone without our knowing anything about them today. Forgive me for teaching—it’s so hard to stop. It’s just that I hear, sometimes, about a writer achieving immortality. Shakespeare, for example, who wrote, “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

A
LLY
K
RANTZ CALLED
, because
Seattle Morning
called her, and she said this was a conference call with a publicist from a good publisher—a publisher who might want to be my publisher once they got a look at my John William book—and this publicist said that I would be crazy not to do it, that it’s not a good idea to turn down television.

A limo got arranged, but since it arrived at 5 a.m., my neighbors didn’t see me get into it. Then there was the makeup, and someone mussing my remaining hair to and fro before giving up on trying to make it look good. Then there was the greenroom, with its muffins and grapes; me; other guests; and a television, surrounded by tropical plants, airing
Seattle Morning.
Quadruplets, the healing power of dogs, Seattle dentists in Jamaica, a home make-over, and “the four-hundred-forty-million-dollar man!”

At the right time, I was escorted onto the set. Under bright lights, a young woman ran a microphone wire up my shirt. Here were my hosts, whose names I didn’t remember. They were attractive in a way I thought of as scary. We hobnobbed painfully. I was asked what it felt like to be fabulously wealthy, but when I started to answer, someone said, “Save it.” Then we agreed that the dentists in Jamaica were doing a good thing and that their story was amazing. Thirty seconds. We groomed. One of my hosts said that if I was nervous it didn’t matter, because I’d still get to keep the money either way—wink. The other said, at the last second, under her breath, in a seductive whisper, “Here we go.”

All this sudden wealth. It must feel so strange.

You were a schoolteacher.

So how has your life changed?

What next? Staying at the Ritz?

Tell us about the hermit. What kind of person was he?

Not your average Lakeside student!

You must have been surprised.

What a generous friend.

Best of luck to you, Neil Countryman. We wish you happiness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE AUTHOR
wishes to thank Robin Guterson, Mike Hobbs, John Wolfe, Bob Fikso, Mike Drake, Ralph Cheadle, Joe Powell, Robin Desser, Anne and Georges Borchardt, Lisa Sanders and the Lakeside School, Judy Lightfoot, Joel Hardin, Danny Wickstrom, and Terry Zaroff-Evans for their assistance during the preparation and writing of this book.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Copper Canyon Press: “A hermit’s heart is heavy” from
The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain
by Han Shan, translated by Red Pine, copyright © 2000 by Bill Porter. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press,
www.coppercanyonpress.org
.

Doubleday: Haiku from
From the Country of Eight Islands
by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, copyright © 1981 by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Henry Holt: Excerpt from “The Master Speed” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Houghton Mifflin Company: Excerpt from “Lastness” from
The Book of Nightmares
by Galway Kinnell, copyright © 1971, renewed 1989 by Galway Kinnell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.