by David Payne
Twenty-six now, George A. has gone in four years from making cold calls at Dean Witter to become a rising star in the office, and as will always be the case, when things are good for him and me, we keep touch only fitfully, so what I mainly have of him are picture-postcard impressions from this period. He and Colleen make improvements to their house in Buena Vista, and I hear about them jetting off to Sanibel and to Jamaica for vacations. They’re members of a church the way we used to be in Henderson. He and Colleen have social standing—a position—like so many of my friends from Exeter and Carolina, who’ve been to law and med and grad school and are marrying, starting practices, securing tenure-track jobs in universities. And maybe that’s why my first author photo shows me in a sober business suit and a dark tie with a neat haircut, instead of as, say, the bearded trawl-boat poet who actually wrote the novel. Because of this photo choice, people sometimes ask if I’m a broker who left Wall Street to try writing. It’s as if I’ve taken out my steamer trunk from Exeter and donned the coat that Margaret bought me once upon a time at Nowell’s. Who does my doppelgänger in the suit resemble? George A., that’s who. In the race, I’m gaining on him.
And now my paperback goes at auction for six figures, and soon thereafter comes a major book club sale, and then European sales, one after another. I, who six months ago was stealing firewood off public lands, emerge like Rip Van Winkle and rub my eyes and then go on a minor Dowist rampage like the hero of my novel when he first arrives in New York City. I buy a car—with cash! I buy a little house—a condominium, actually. I get a credit card, my first—with a $500 credit limit. What next?
Stacy. One night at a student play in Winston she, who has the good looks of the ingénue, does a comic turn on stage, wearing nerdy Buddy Holly glasses and speaking in a Russian accent channeled from her clowning coach at school, a Muscovite. “Hhhhhahney,” she says, for “honey,” slow and dripping with a Slavic note, and the first time the audience laughs, the second time we howl, and after that the building threatens to detach from its foundations every time she says it. Delighted by her talent, I write her a note complimenting her performance, we have drinks and carry the party on to my house, where I put on “Going to California” and sit beside her on the loveseat, reading her a little Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” my old standby.
And unlike so many of the summer girls who fled at high speed or waited impatiently for me to wrap up my tried-and-not-so-true seduction, Stacy’s eyes still and deepen and she looks as though a door has opened to a place she’s never been but somehow knows about the same way I do. In addition to attraction, I recognize in her another artist and an aspiration like my aspiration to live a life that’s more than working to eat in order to keep working in order to have children who work to eat in order to keep working. And so we set out together to the place that True Loves go to—call it California. With rueful fondness, then, I see us, the tinhorn writer and the actress, at the steamboat landing with a trunk of props and books and costumes in lieu of tools and seeds and rifles, and Cali seems close, so close that evening, as though we’ll click our heels three times and close our eyes and be there in the morning. At 6 A.M., though, when the sky lightens and birds begin to sing outside, we’re still on the loveseat with a pile of opened books and an overflowing ashtray. Stacy’s glassy eyes are happy and relaxed. And she mentions him, the boyfriend. It’s over now, she says. Almost. For all intents and purposes.
Weeks of nights like this one follow. I tell Stacy I love her and she reciprocates the declaration. Six weeks in, I ask her to marry me, and Stacy says she isn’t ready, but she sees me as the one, she’d like to someday. On weeknights she stays with me and on weekends drives home to see her family. One night, late, the phone rings. Calling from New York, the boyfriend is collected as he lays out the situation. It turns out that Stacy hasn’t been visiting her mom on weekends, but across town at her student house entertaining him, the boyfriend, when he flies down from the city. I hang up and sweep things off a bookshelf. I break up with her—only for a week, though. Then I call and say I want to work it out because I’ve never felt anything like this and I don’t want to lose it or to lose her.
But now it seems to me that I felt something like it in New York at the 96th Street station when Nell told me she might be pregnant and I saw my future as though God or fate had spoken. I was twenty-five then. Now I’m twenty-eight. As the world turns, I’ve come so close to falling off the edge. But now I have a published book, I have a car, a house. And George A. and so many of my friends have settled down and married. With Stacy, I have another shot at normal. I’m the snow goose in the chevron way up high there almost in the jet stream and it’s time to go south and I’m going. Looking back, I see how my urgency helps to drive Stacy underground, pressuring her to end her relationship before she’s ready. On her side, she lies to me while telling me she loves me. So we get back together and set out for New York, True Loves and Fellow Travelers, with two passengers unseen behind us on the back bench of the wagon, Shadow Stacy and Shadow David, who have inflicted the first injury and carry the first grievance.
Our first two years in New York are good ones. Stacy has success as an actress—appearances on L.A. Law and the lead role, Catherine Simms, “a pretty heiress,” in Larry Shue’s The Foreigner, which she performs at Syracuse Stage and reprises at the Detroit Rep later. Me, I’ve embarked on a new book, a precursor of this one. My novel—though it’s brought me, brought us, money and a degree of comfort—hasn’t changed me in the way I hoped and wanted. So I resolve to go more radical, to talk about my family in a memoir, to tell or try to tell the truth about what happened—not because I understand it but because I don’t and want to for the first time.
We visit Vermont on weekends, where Stacy’s older sister Ginger lives in a small town with her husband and four children in a big yellow house that used to be a church, complete with steeple, choir loft and stained-glass windows. They take us in and feed us pasta dinners and sheet cake from the Grand Union.
Over time, I pick up Stacy’s family story: her soldier father’s repeated tours in Vietnam, her brilliant, fragile mother left alone to raise five children. After the divorce, her mother, left with little, goes back to school to get her PhD while trying to raise and clothe and feed so many. She strives but suffers periodic nervous breakdowns, periodic hospitalization. The siblings—so it seems to me—had to band together to care for and protect each other, and Ginger, as the oldest girl, mothered the two youngest, Stacy and her little brother. Ginger became a giver.
Starting out in the same birth-order position, I watch George A. get Pa’s signet and the shotgun and the Datsun and I become one who wants parity and fairness, and perceives the deviation from them as injustice. As Stacy was formed in her relationship with Ginger, so I by mine with George A., and this sets us up for major conflict, and now is when we’re about to learn it.
I’m glad you got this off your chest, says my old editor from Houghton when he reads my memoir. A two-year effort that nets zero dollars and is never published.
Stacy has a crisis now, too. Her agents die of AIDS, two in quick succession, and she can’t get another. The money from my novel’s gone or going and there’s no more coming soon and we’ve moved from a large, gracious sublet on 104th and Broadway to a cramped ground-floor studio at 87th and Columbus. Stacy needs to make a full-time job of going to auditions—so she feels. Me, I want her to get a day job and join me in the traces, only when I suggest the possibility she regards me with surprise and disappointment, as if to say, Who are you, David? I thought you were someone different, more generous.
That look kills me, because somewhere inside I want to be that person, want to be Pa Rose and pull the plow for both of us, but after two years of paying our whole nut, I resent being made to feel ungenerous, though it isn’t Stacy but me who makes me feel it. Under everything, I, who’ve run so far and hard to escape my family, find myself back in the old dynamic; it’s as
if, in crisis, Stacy needs the ice-cream soda and expects me to supply it and I find this insupportable and toxic. In conflict, without insight, often now I say something bad-tempered and ineffective, This is bullshit!, and storm out and run some laps around the reservoir. Only now my knee goes—first, the left, then when I recover and start to train again, the right. And just like that, at thirty-one, after sixteen years, it’s over for me as a runner. And in this same period, I remember drinking during the day for the first time. This goes on for a month, and then I stop it.
So after two years in the city, the second one in conflict, Stacy and I split up over money and all the deeper things that go under that shallow rubric: who owes, who pays, how much of mine—my money, labor, time, attention—do I owe her, how much of hers does she owe me, how much into our common operation? We never had an understanding, much less a contract on the subject, and the issues now will be the same as they are later when we’re married.
Stacy takes a day job and moves in with a friend from art school. I come up with a new book idea over a weekend and set out on Monday morning writing in a fever, and the period that follows is like the white screen after a bomb’s dropped in a movie. In my memory the next two and a half years are white screen, and no doubt that’s why I have so few memories of George A. during this period.
I do have one, though. Down south, he’s become a father and in the summer of ’86 or ’87 I recall him at Four Roses playing with the baby. It’s early morning, I’ve come up from the lair and find him on the ocean-facing porch, lifting his son high, then dropping him and lifting him again, and he’s making faces, George A. is, eyes wide, going Whoopsie, Whoopsie Daisy, and his infant in the knit cap looks alarmed and very interested in Daddy. I see George A. in Bermuda shorts, unshaved, with glassy eyes as though maybe he and Colleen went out drinking, or, more likely, stayed up with the baby. George A.’s twenty-eight and still has the frat house on him, but you can see the office and the work world in him now, too, life is weighing in and on him just a little. George A.’s heavier, aging the way men did once upon a time in Henderson when they dealt in timber, farms and profits. He’s got money and a wife who loves him and a job he loves and now a son and soon another. Little Brother’s good here, all good, and the storm hits from a clear blue sky on September 6, 1987.
I’ve flown from New York to attend a cousin’s wedding in Henderson, and Margaret’s there with Jack, and Colleen, it seems, has driven with us. We’re at the Country Club and George A.’s driving separately to meet us, and the night wears on and when he doesn’t show, we muster and begin to whisper plans of action. Then the call comes: George A.’s wrecked his BMW. He isn’t seriously injured, but when I see him the next night at Margaret’s, a dark aura surrounds him. Leaning back against the kitchen counter, a beer in the hand that wears Pa’s signet, he has his tie knot slacked, his collar open on a crisp white shirt that shows off his black eye, and George A. wears a sneer that says, or seems to me to say, You disapprove? You don’t think I should be doing this? Fuck it, watch me go. And when I ask him if he tried to kill himself the night before, he answers, Yes, without the slightest hesitation. Yes, he says, staring me straight in the eye, and then he grins that devastating grin, sips his beer, and his warm, black eyes become disconsolate.
What’s happened? It’s four days before his birthday—his episodes were always in or near September. All I really have to go by is a therapist I work with later, who tells me that the four-month phase I entered when finishing my first novel was “hypomanic,” so I imagine George A.’s mental state as a more intense version of what I felt out there on the Outer Banks when day and night lost meaning and I worked for thirty-six straight hours and the broken marsh reeds at the tide line resembled hexagrams and I began to feel that I could almost read them. Based on later developments, I know George A. saw or felt he saw connections in the market and traded on them for himself and for his clients. And I recall how, as I wrote my final chapters I began to fray and smolder and wonder how much longer I could stand it, and I imagine that, for George A., it reached that point and just kept going, and he must have known, having been there before, that this wound up in one place and one place only: at Mandala, in the black room where you come to and the spotlight hits you and you don’t know what the play is or the character you’re playing, and it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked, how many cold calls you’ve made or how many plaques you’ve received in the Ramada ballroom, it doesn’t matter how much your wife loves you or you love her, it happened when you were seventeen when you made eleven tackles and then again at twenty-two when Merrill hired you as the youngest broker in their Buckhead office and now it’s happening again four days before you turn twenty-nine, Happy Birthday, and what do you do then? Maybe you think fuck it and turn the wheel a little to the right and hold it and drive off the road one lonely night as you’re coming to a cousin’s wedding, and you do it not because things are going badly but because they’re going well and it just doesn’t matter how they’re going.
Anger. I think that’s why George A. tried to kill himself. In 2008, when Bill puts the pistol to his head and leaves his blood and brains spattered on the bathroom wall in Florida for his wife to find, my therapist will tell me suicide, particularly the bloody, messy kinds, are almost always acts of rage by which the suicide means to take down others with him. And anger is what I saw in George A.’s face that night in Margaret’s kitchen. What was George A. angry at? The only thing I’m certain of is that he was angry at his illness. Why that night? I think George A. was getting manic and he knew and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
I suspect this because, only days after my return to New York from the wedding—a week or two at most—I get Margaret’s phone call. George A.’s psychotic, and this time he’s refused to go to Mandala, refused Colleen and Margaret both. He won’t go in, Margaret says, until he sees me. So I turn around and fly home, and I recall negotiating with him on an old plaid sofa in the playroom of his house while Colleen and Margaret wait in the drive with folded arms and dark expressions. The TV’s blaring, and George A. says he doesn’t think he’s sick, he isn’t sure, he’s just mainly having trouble peeing. He goes into the bath to try and puts his hand against the light switch. When I ask him what he’s doing, he says he has to ground himself electrically.
–Is that weird? he asks, wincing.
–You have to go in, buddy, I tell him, and he covers his face with both hands and stands there, shoulders shaking, and I put my arms around him. When he’s done, we walk out to the car and drive to Mandala.
The beads begin to look alike now. This one’s red and that one’s blue, in Atlanta it was hostage rescue and now he has to ground himself electrically, but asking George A. how he might not be grounded in his life seems no more helpful than asking who the hostage was that he was being sent to rescue. What matters is that the beads of George A.’s episodes are mounting and keep coming, and I know it’s bad, but I have no idea how bad.
After all, we’ve been dealing with this for thirteen or fourteen years now, and George A.’s gotten seriously sick three times, maybe four, and every episode’s been awful, hard on him and everyone around him, but each has cost only a few weeks, ten or twelve at most, a stay at Mandala to get him through the worst of the psychosis and to stabilize his lithium, a few additional weeks at home, and then, each time, George A. has brushed himself off and trotted back onto the field the way he did in football. And this episode follows the same pattern. After he rests, George A. gets up one morning and takes out a suit, shines his shoes and drives back to the office. It’s gone on this way for years. Why shouldn’t it go on this way for years yet? Who would ever think we’re almost at the ending? I don’t. I never think that.
So I fly back to Manhattan, and in 1988, a year after George A.’s accident, I finish my second novel and my agent submits to twenty-six or -seven editors. After twenty-five or -six have passed on it, I, who set out to get my
hundred thousand hours in the writing lap lane, not on the pool deck with a bullhorn, am scanning the AWP listings praying someone will pay me $27.5K to teach four classes a semester and sit on “the requisite number of committees” in Alabama or Wyoming. And one gray Friday afternoon at the end of a gray week my agent calls to tell me Editor Twenty-seven has made an offer that takes me, in a week, from struggling to make rent to shopping to purchase an apartment. And one weekend on a visit to Vermont I think what the hell and call a realtor and find that little hidden valley that holds the late-day sunlight like a little bowl holds water, and as I stand in the upper meadow gazing toward the Adirondacks in blue profile, I hear the brook whispering below us in the streambed the way Ruin Creek once whispered below our old house in Henderson, and I go back to New York and dream about that land and make an offer and I buy it, and the first summer I put in the power, road and septic, and the second summer—’91—I begin to build it.
By this time, Stacy and I are dating again. She has her own place now on 72nd west of Broadway and is working as a researcher at a hedge fund. She’s left acting and started writing, working nights and weekends on a screenplay. We start going to dinner and the theater, and sometimes Stacy reaches for the check and pays and sometimes I do, and in prosperity, with our common aspiration back in focus, our old feelings rekindle. Living separately, we feel our old issues are off the table, and it seems to us, or me, that we’ve solved them or life has solved them for us. After all, our circumstances are quite different. My career is back on track, on an upward trajectory, and Stacy is self-supporting, making as much as or more than I am, cheerful and contented in her independence. We aren’t the same children who came to the city in 1985. I’m thirty-six, Stacy’s thirty-one, we’re all grown up and our connection remains a strong one. So once again we stay up late talking, laughing, exchanging thirty-minute kisses the way we did once upon a time in Winston on the loveseat, and she takes the Taconic with me up to Wells and helps me pick the white and purple lilacs for the corners. And that fall, when the house is finally finished, my first night there, arriving after midnight, I see the aurora over Northeast Mountain and it seems an omen, and a good one.
