Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  Back in New York, Nell, who said she’d call me, hasn’t. I’ve called her once from Winston to ask her if there’s any news, and she just says, There isn’t, tersely, and I wonder at her terseness. I can’t remember if I called a second time and laid out my position clearly or if I just had the conversation with her in my head so many times it seems we might have had it in reality. In any case, I expect Nell knows the direction I’m leaning from my original reaction at the subway.

  And what is my position? If the lovesickness I came down with on moving to the city felt religious in its depth, it pales in comparison with what erupts now, an upwelling of the lifeforce that at the time seems unrelated to George A. and now seems impossible to understand without him. It’s as if God or fate has spoken and finally told me my true purpose: to be the father of this child, Nell’s husband or partner. I see the little house, the picket fence, the residential street with parking and I’m at the kitchen table there, the househusband who writes while listening to the monitor, or maybe I just give up writing altogether, this folly I embarked on that day beneath the elms and maples. I can teach school and maybe learn to tie a bowtie and wear a Harris tweed like those young men with the defeated eyes at Exeter, and if they looked amused when I told them I was going to be a writer, I know why now, don’t I? I can come home in the afternoon and put down my beat-up satchel and throw the football with our son or daughter and grade papers after supper and everything that’s up in the air can come down to earth and rest and find support there and be earthbound and everything that’s dangerous and scary can be safe and normal, normal—that word is so attractive.

  Following your libido and living outside and underneath the money system sounds good when you’re twenty years old in Wilson Library, but out here in the real world no one asked me for this novel, no one’s missing it or waiting—except me, I am, and it feels like a bag of hot rocks now, one I’ve been carrying on my back for coming on to two years and I want to put it down, I want it off me. And, you see, if Nell is pregnant and we have the baby I can live selflessly for others, for my wife and for our baby, and I’ll no longer be this selfish person, but someone more like, say, George Bailey. And the two years I’ve put into my writing, and the years before that back to Exeter? Fuck it, let them go, it’s cheap compared with the relief of reaching normal. That word, that place, that state.

  And why all this seems suspect is because I haven’t asked Nell what she wants or may want and what she doesn’t or may not. And I think, though I don’t know, that what I feel must be what Margaret felt when she got pregnant at eighteen, a sense of transport almost religious in its depth and power, and I believe she loved him, but Bill was mainly there to make it happen for her, which is why in their old wedding photographs from Bennettsville, Bill, my skinny twenty-year-old father with his big Adam’s apple, looks like a condemned man on the way to his own execution and Margaret looks like Tolstoy’s Anna, incandescent, and the death of their marriage and our family is already evident in their expressions. And as there was love with Bill and Margaret once upon a time so there is with Nell and me now, but love is just the sunlight on the surface, underneath the dark force drives the iceberg through the ocean and the dark force is about trapping and extraction and with Nell I’m the would-be trapper and extractor, I want her to have the baby to solve it for me because I don’t know how to bring it to solution and I’m scared and want things settled, easier, and maybe the idea of normal appeals to Nell, too, however briefly, and that’s why she lets herself have unprotected sex and floats her gambit on the down stairs at the 96th Street station. The curious thing is how we repeat in New York in the ’80s what Bill and Margaret played out in North Carolina the ’50s, which Stacy and I will repeat later, and what makes us repeat repeat repeat the thing that made us so unhappy in the first place, and how different were we, outside the bell curve, or only as fingerprints and snowflakes?

  And Nell, when I finally reach her, says, Oh, my period came, no worries, and I touch back down in Kansas.

  And the next time she comes to see me, back at my apartment after dinner, Nell says, I have something to tell you, and she’s sitting crisscross on my mattress as she says it and her eyes are melty but not the way they were the day she pushed me backward into the apartment, there’s sadness in them, and she’s very, very beautiful the way people are in the last snapshot of them you carry in your memory.

  –I had an abortion.

  She just holds my eyes, denying and defending nothing.

  And I sit down beside her on the mattress and we stare into each other’s eyes and then we put our heads on each other’s shoulders and cry a long time or maybe only I do, and then we fuck with all our grief and anger and our love and disappointment, all night as the oboists and opera singers do their scales and people fight and read their children bedtime stories and their disembodied voices swirl like prayer around us in the courtyard, and when the gray light fills the window, it’s over and we are too, Nell and I, that’s the ending, perhaps it shouldn’t be, but it is. And why? Is it because I tried to trap her and Nell didn’t let me, because Nell may have tried to trap herself and then thought better of it and I’m angry that she foiled my plan for normal? I don’t think so. The feeling I have is more like metal that’s been bent and bends again and when it finally gives way it’s the cumulative fatigue that does it and the giving way is gentle, and the feeling in my heart toward Nell that morning and after has more gentleness than anger in it, and the true answer’s more disturbing . . .

  It was when she told me she was pregnant or she might be that I felt the upwelling of the lifeforce, so when the carousel began to turn I felt swept up in the current, and the carillon music moved me and moved through me and the very thing that made my parents so unhappy is the thing I sought out and recognized and called “love” when I found it, because I knew no better and “love” is what it felt like, familiar and electric, and even the little boy with the rain-sheeted eyes who knew the dance was joyless crossed the park with his au pair to see it and stood transfixed while it happened, and when it stopped he turned away like all the others, the way I turn away from Nell now after she breaks the axle of the wheel that turns the carousel that moves me. And months later from the blue one night she calls me and says, Are we going to do this, David? and I’m glad to hear from her, but I say, I think that ship has sailed already. She, free, offers herself freely, and I, free, miss the carillon music and decline her, and if I’d known that love is to see another’s idiocrasy and hold it as precious as your own is, I might have loved her and been worthy of her love, except I wasn’t and I didn’t, so I lose her, and she loses me.

  And the years hell on, and down in Winston, George A. meets Colleen, a striking redhead who’s a corporate attorney. Before you know it they’re getting married and he’s brought her home to meet the family. To me, he still seems shaky from Atlanta, it feels a little rushed, but maybe George A. wants a little normal—I don’t know, and if so, who am I to judge him? After the announcement, Margaret takes Colleen to lunch and tells her the whole unpretty story, about the hostages and the burns in the Formica, but George A.’s told Colleen already and she loves George A. so much, she says, it doesn’t matter and I’m sure she means it at the time she says it.

  I find Colleen smart, conservative and straight and will never fully grasp how her conservatism fits with the part of George A. that’s a gambler or how her straightness works with George A.’s humor, which goes back to the naughty little boy who got more points from misbehavior than compliance. But who knows what goes on in anybody else’s marriage? George A.’s is part of his healthy life that I’ll know mainly from a distance, seeing him and Colleen across the room at Christmas parties, an attractive, well-dressed couple, sharing a joke with Colleen at a dinner, telling her about my professional life and hearing about hers, a sentence exchanged in each direction. And later, when George A. gets sick again, I’ll know her as a harrowed and exhausted woman
standing in her driveway with her arms crossed tightly, waiting as I go inside to face George A. and try to talk him into going back to Mandala.

  Now, though, when George A.’s twenty-four, he asks me to be his best man and Margaret sends me out to buy a suit for the occasion, handing me her credit card to buy it.

  And it’s May of 1982, last month I turned twenty-seven and the bag of rocks, my novel—which I started sixteen months ago in New Haven, on New Year’s Day, 1980—feels heavier and hotter and when Margaret looks at me with worry and says, Don’t you think you have to finish your book and put it out there and see what happens? I say, Absolutely! but her look wrings something inside me. And when their friends come over to the house and ask me what I’m doing, I tell them about my season in the Atlantic scallop fishery and the mutiny I once fomented in Cape May, New Jersey, and how I had to hitchhike home without a dime and spent the night in the hayloft of some farmer’s barn in Delaware or maybe it was Maryland, and they laugh at the right places and regard me narrowly as if to say, What’s happening to this one? His wheels are not engaging with the blacktop.

  And there are Colleen and George A. in front of the whole congregation, exchanging vows and entering adulthood, ducking into the stretch limo and heading off to honeymoon on Kiawah or Folly Island before returning to their starter house in Buena Vista, and there I am, the leader of a mean platoon of Payne and Furst boys, placing a large dummy—a sort of George A. golem that’s as tall as he is and has his Fuller Brush mustache and black George A. hair drawn on in Magic Marker—on the hood of George A.’s Beamer. The creature’s wearing one of George A.’s suits with fly unzipped, and emerging from the fly is a 10- or 12-inch dildo. We’ve cupped the golem’s hand around this member and drawn, as well as we can capture it, the grin of happy illegality. Little Jack and I are laughing and high-fiving Bennett and little Dickie in the lot and it seems pretty funny, but I expect my stunt’s related to the fact that in the race George A.’s leaving me behind now. In fact, I’m so far back chances are he’s forgotten we were even racing and is simply out there living. And I once thought I’d be the winner.

  And now a curious thing occurs. At the beginning of September, as soon as the family clears out for the season, I head down to Four Roses and very quickly something starts to happen.

  I get up at my usual hour, 5, 5:30, and write till 3 or 4 P.M., and then I run and take a shower, eat a sandwich and set back to work at 8 o’clock at night, working through till 4 or 5 the following morning. Shower, eat, sleep, rise at noon and write till 10 P.M., run, eat, start again at midnight and write till 9 A.M. And when I do lie down to sleep at midnight or at noon, my mind diesels like an engine and I leap up and jot down notes on my half sheets of foolscap. Eighteen- and twenty-hour days are common, and I once sit at that rocking, flimsy table, banging the keys and speaking lines aloud for cadence, laughing, crying sometimes though not often, for thirty-six straight hours. In fifteen weeks, from September 1 till Christmas Eve, I compose 150,000 words, the same amount I’ve written in the fifteen months preceding. Out there, day and night lose meaning, and when I walk the beach, the broken marsh reeds at the tide line begin to resemble hexagrams from the I Ching and I begin to think that I can almost read them and discern something of Nature’s hidden purpose or God’s or Yours whoever You are. And till now I haven’t known that such a state existed, which feels as good as love and conveniently does not require the presence of another, for me always the hard part and probably why I left the real world in the first place somewhere long ago in childhood and developed my big inner claw while my real-world claw stayed puny. Once you’ve tasted this, though, it’s hard to come back to the real world or to want to. But however ravishing and beautiful, this state is wearying finally and a point comes when you almost beg for respite from it, I do, and I begin to fray and smolder and wonder how much longer I can stand it.

  This is the closest I’ll ever come to tasting what it might be like for George A. when he’s manic and why he, or anyone, might want to flush the meds designed to stop it. And in this phase where coincidence seems fateful, I stumble on my parents’ wedding photos which I’ve never seen and discover not exactly hidden but put away in the bottom drawer of Margaret’s dressing table. The first shot in the series doesn’t quite go with the others. It shows eighteen-year-old Margaret in a wasp-waisted bridesmaid’s dress with a spray of chiffon over her décolletage standing in the foyer of the big house on Woodland. It’s May of 1954, and her big sister Genevieve is getting married, a white wedding at Holy Innocents Episcopal before the assembled hosts of Henderson and Bath, her husband’s hometown. I imagine Margaret in the run-up, home from St. Mary’s and signing for deliveries as the aunts from Bath and Richmond, those impressive, scary matrons with their jewels and their drivers, arrive to offer Mary their congratulations, saying, How proud you must be, how proud, and to Margaret, One day this will be you, sugar, one day, hopefully, and Margaret, smiling, takes that “hopefully” and runs off to accept the next delivery.

  And it’s May of 1954, and on the eighth Genevieve walks down the aisle, and the next picture in the folder shows Bill and Margaret on the chapel steps in Bennettsville with the justice and their dazed, exhausted-looking parents, smiling bravely for the camera. It’s the beginning of September now, four months after Genevieve’s white wedding, and this is Margaret’s black one. And she, with her hat and gloves and traveling dress and the little black bag at her elbow, is two months pregnant. Eight weeks after Genevieve walked down the aisle, Margaret got pregnant at a house party over July 4th weekend, and offered the chance to have it fixed up north in Philly, Margaret says no, she doesn’t want it fixed, she’s never been so happy the family storyteller tells me later, which is why I think she feels the upwelling of the lifeforce like I later feel with Nell in New York City, and Bill beside her with his hands folded and his outsized Adam’s apple looks like a condemned man on the way to his own execution.

  So Margaret has the baby, me, the first boy in a generation, and suddenly all’s forgiven, her parents are tearing up and passing the cigars out. Margaret takes the laurels for the first time, and what does Margaret win? The gray-shingled house on Ruin Creek, the ’54 Bel Air her parents buy the couple, Eva Brame, a maid, membership at the Country Club, a pew at Holy Innocents, the ice-cream soda complete with whipped cream and maraschino cherry. And what good does it do them, do us? The end is already apparent in Bill’s expression in the photo.

  And on February 2, 1956, Groundhog Day, Genevieve delivers her first son, my cousin Louis, 297 days after my birth, and if a normal term is forty weeks, 280 days, Genevieve is pregnant within seventeen days of Margaret’s delivery of me, within seventeen days of the parental tears and the passing of cigars and the balloon drop. And Genevieve’s second son follows George A. at a similar interval and she names him George, too, as though refusing to cede title, and it’s in these years that Genevieve is first forcibly committed—by her husband, Big Louis, and Margaret—and on the psych ward sets herself on fire and manages to survive it.

  And when I, a man of over fifty, put this time line to seventy-something Margaret who’s sterling-haired now like her mother, Margaret shakes her head and says, All this time and no one ever saw it. And I, at twenty-seven, four months after George A.’s wedding, set off for the beach and in a state bordering on madness, write in fifteen weeks what I’ve written in the fifteen months preceding.

  And on December 23, I fall asleep and dream the ending of my novel, and on Christmas Eve I write it and put the final period on the final page at 3 P.M. and close the house and set out to join my family for Christmas and make it a hundred miles and pull into a cheap motel in Murfreesboro and crash there. Christmas morning I wake early and drive the deserted roads to Winston, and when I tell my family I’ve finished they say, Congratulations!, but their eyes say, What happens now? What’s different? and I no more know than they do since no one’s ever read it.

  And three
months later I’m at Four Roses with Jack and Margaret, forty feet up on an extension ladder painting the soffit in the gable, when the phone rings and Margaret throws up a second-story window and says, It’s for you, from Boston, and hands me the phone, one of those heavy old first-generation cordless ones, and it’s Houghton Mifflin telling me my novel’s been accepted and they’re offering me their Literary Fellowship Award and a small advance, but way high up there I don’t care about the money. I can see the ocean and the sky is blue and cloudless and Avalon, the pier, isn’t far now, and I’m heading toward it. Flying.

  9

  In 1984, I, Big Brother, publish my first novel, and one Sunday morning I walk into Rainbow News, Winston’s indie bookstore, and find my picture on the front page of the Washington Post Book World and stand there, with something like a supernova going off inside me, as around me people go on chatting, drinking coffee.

  In February of that year, at the Junior Chamber of Commerce dinner in the Ramada ballroom, George A. is Winston’s Jaycee of the Month and gets his plaque and his ovation from the youthful strivers in their suits and evening dresses eating rubber chicken.