by Peter Ferry
She squinted into the sun and smiled the kind of smile that makes you feel that life might not be so bad after all. "Move out of the sun," she said. "Come sit." She put her book down and pulled her knees up to her chest. She was barefoot despite the coolness.
"Are you alone?" I asked.
"Yep."
"No little architect?"
"No little architect," she laughed, but didn't elaborate.
"So, what are you reading now?" We talked about books and authors. She told me about the plot of her novel.
"Would you still like someone to stay in your place?" I asked.
She looked at me uncertainly.
"I mean me. That way Cooper could stay in his own house."
"You? Just you?"
I nodded. She cocked her head. "What's going on?"
I shook my head.
"Well," she said, "I'd have to know that it's okay with Lydia."
I told her that it was Lydia's idea and that she'd volunteered to keep both dogs while I was on the canoe trip.
"Well," she said, and I could see that she was worried about getting in the middle of something, "that would be great, I guess, if you really want to; I'd want to phone Lydia and talk to her." We made tentative plans to meet in the city the next night so that she could show me the fuse box, give me keys, go over Cooper's routine. When we finished, the ease of conversation we had had earlier was gone. I said something about getting back to work and left. On the beach, I threw a stick for Art. He and Cooper both went after it. I looked back. Carolyn was still sitting, still reading.
I got up at four on Monday morning. In the breast pocket of the flannel shirt I slipped on against the morning chill, I found the newspaper photo of Lisa Kim's parents and the camera-conscious woman laughing and the oblivious man rising; there was something in the picture that made me want to look at it and look at it some more, so I taped it to the mirror in my bathroom at the cottage and studied it as I scraped three days of stubble from my face. Then I forgot it. I left it there. I had locked up, carried my shopping bags down to the car, and driven into the city before I realized it. Just as well. I probably would have had an accident gazing at the damned thing.
I avoided stopping by the apartment. It was still cool, so Art could sleep all day in the car. He didn't mind that at all. I called Lydia from school and was relieved when she didn't answer. I tried to sound casual on her voice mail. I told her I'd run into Carolyn and made all the arrangements. "She leaves tomorrow, so I guess I'll stay over there tomorrow night." After I hung up, I tried to tell myself it was no big deal.
I decided I wouldn't tell Gene Brooke about the whole business with Lydia. It wasn't out of any desire to obfuscate, but out of a need to get on with the Lisa Kim stuff. It turned out that he wasn't in as big a hurry as I was, but it didn't matter anyway, because as soon as I sat down, I told him everything. I thought I was getting it out of the way, but he didn't; he thought I was introducing it. It was his belief that Lydia and Lisa probably weren't two separate issues, that it probably wasn't coincidental that they were happening at the same time, that I probably needed to understand my feelings for Lydia before I dealt with Lisa Kim. All of this seemed terribly obvious when he said it, and I felt foolish or naïve for not having seen it. Jesus, my feelings for Lydia? Why had I not stopped to examine these more thoughtfully? I guessed that I was sad. I guessed that I felt some relief or release, but also some guilt; more than anything, I was pissed off.
"Can you tell me why?" he asked.
"Because she's acting as if this whole Lisa Kim thing is some kind of frivolous lark, and she's treating me as if I'm Don Quixote, off tilting at windmills."
I thought he might ask me if I were tilting at windmills; if the tables had been turned, I probably would have asked him, but Gene seemed seldom to ask the next question, the obvious one. I wondered if not doing so was a technique, something he had studied and learned. I imagined grad students sitting on folding chairs in a circle asking each other unexpected questions. The one he asked me was, "What do you think that Lydia feels?"
Lydia? Jesus. I didn't know. It was as if I were going on a journey, and he was asking me the most basic questions: Have you packed a bag? Have you purchased a ticket? Have you planned your itinerary? I'd done none of it. I guessed that Lydia, too, was angry. I guessed that she was hurt and worried. I guessed that she was resentful.
"Why do you think she feels those things?"
"Because she's possessive."
"Which is something you had both agreed never to be, so you're angry."
"Exactly," I said.
"But why is she possessive?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Is she afraid of losing you?"
"Maybe."
"Why is that do you think?"
"I don't know."
"Could it be because she loves you?"
"I guess."
"Okay," he said, "would I be twisting your words too much if I said that you are mad at Lydia because she loves you?"
I had to think about that for a while. "I suppose not. We weren't supposed to fall in love with each other."
"So she's violated your agreement?" Then he wanted to know why Lydia would have ever agreed to such a thing in the first place. Why would she want to be in a relationship not based on love? We decided the only reason would be if she was afraid of love. And if she was no longer afraid of love, wasn't that good? Didn't it say that she was healthier and more mature? And why had I ever wanted to be with someone who was neither of these things? Was I, too, afraid of love?
I needed time to think. "I was different," I finally said. "I doubted the existence of love because I didn't think I'd ever really been in love."
"And are you now?"
"No, but I think I can be. That's the difference. I think Lisa Kim's death shook me by the shoulders. It said, 'Look, that could be you crumpled there.'"
"So you've changed, too, like Lydia," Gene said.
I had to admit that I had. Then why was I mad at Lydia for changing? Was I mad at her because I didn't love her? Was I mad because she wasn't lovable enough? Suddenly our time was up, but I didn't want to stop. Gene insisted.
"Man," I said, "this is hard." We agreed to meet again before I left for Canada.
Speaking the truth to Gene made me feel like an honest—if foolish—man, and seemed to ease my anxiety a bit. I wanted to do more of it; on Saturday I went to see Tanya Kim. She was fitting someone, so I waited and looked over the boots on display. She noticed me when she came out with arms of shoeboxes: "Oh, hi."
"Sell me some stuff for a canoe trip?" I asked.
While I waited, I picked out a waterproof poncho, a flashlight, a pocketknife, and an unbreakable water bottle.
When Tanya came, she looked at these things. She recommended a different knife and two pairs of water shoes. "You don't want to cut your foot out there," she said. Then she sold me some socks and T-shirts that breathe and dry quickly, and a pair of nylon fishing pants with zip-off legs.
While she was ringing me up, I asked her how she was doing. I again made my question general, but she again answered in the specific and with the same air of confidentiality I'd felt from her before. I decided I'd reciprocate and told her about going to see Gene Brooke. This interested her. She said that her father had wanted Lisa to see a counselor and was now after her to.
"I don't suppose Lisa ever did . . ."
"Of course she did."
"Really? That surprises me a little," I said.
"Why? It was the perfect Lisa situation. Someone else agrees to sit still and listen to you talk about yourself for a whole hour. You must not have known her as well as you thought you did."
Did I detect that she was tempting me to tell her the truth? I decided to meet her halfway. "Tanya, I didn't know her at all. That's another reason I came in here today. I wanted to tell you that I wasn't Lisa's boyfriend."
She cocked her head and maybe she even smiled a little bit. "I'd kind o
f figured that out."
"Do you know who I am?" I asked.
"No." She had finished bagging my things, and she was looking into my eyes now, maybe for the first time.
I took a little breath. "I saw the accident. I was right behind her. I was the first one to get to her. That's my only connection to her." I watched her closely; she seemed okay. She then carefully asked me the obvious questions: How did it happen? Did she say anything? Was she conscious? Was she even alive?
Finally she handed me my bags. "I got your letter," she said. "Have you talked to Rosie Belcher? She was Lisa's best friend. If anyone can help you, she can."
"Yeah, I made the connection in the yearbook, but I just can't find her. She's not in any directory, and neither are her parents."
"They moved to the East Coast after Rosalie got married, but she's still around here. It's Rosalie Svigos, now. She's a doctor." Some small thing had changed. She met my eyes again. She listened when I told her about my trip. She said she hoped I would have a good time.
Gene had me go through the accident again, looking for the thing that was bothering me. We went minute by minute. He asked me lots of questions: How would you have approached Lisa? What if she'd locked her door? What would you say to her? Are your emergency flashers on? Does she have bucket seats? If you take her key, doesn't her steering wheel lock? He asked me over and over to imagine the best-case scenario, to imagine everything going right.
"Well," I said, "I guess she probably wouldn't say 'thank you very much. I know I'm drunk as a skunk, and I really appreciate your saving my life.'"
"Okay, but suppose she does. Suppose she cooperates and doesn't scream or Mace you or shoot you. What next?"
We went through the whole thing; there were a thousand problems. "But Gene, I've known that. I've really known that all along, but there's still something bothering me. It's like the name of a state capital or movie director that's circling my head, and I can't quite reach out and grasp it." I asked him if there was a memory drug that might bring the thing back. He didn't know of one. He said that we could try hypnosis, that he used it sometimes to help people quit smoking or lose weight or deal with anxiety.
"And it works?"
"Sometimes. It depends on the person. In your case, I think maybe we're looking in the wrong place and it might help us find the right place. Have you ever heard of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine?" He told me about the two British mountain climbers who disappeared on Mount Everest in 1924. No trace of them had ever been found. In the meantime, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest, followed by dozens of others, and every one of them had the same goal: the summit at 29,000 feet. Every one. Then, a few years ago, a young German climber named Jochen Hemmleb shifted his sights ever so slightly, and said that he wanted to climb to 28,000 feet, not 29,000, and he wanted to reach Mallory and Irvine, not the summit. So he calculated the most likely place where the climbers would have fallen, went right there, and found Mallory, who was actually in one piece, preserved by the thin, cold air, including his clothing and equipment. Then Hemmleb found dozens of other climbers, although not Irvine, in the same bizarre graveyard of a boulder field in various states of preservation, many identifiable by nationality and expedition because of the clothing they were wearing and the equipment they were carrying. So now orthodontists from Dallas and socialites from Marin County and whole Japanese climbing clubs have gotten to the top of Everest, but Jochen Hemmleb went somewhere entirely different and found something entirely different because he changed the angle of his quest by a fraction of a degree. "So maybe that's what we need to do," said Gene.
"Explain how hypnosis fits in," I said.
Gene asked me to think of my mind as a circle with a horizontal diameter. Above the line is the conscious mind and below it the unconscious. Apparently hypnosis, which is really nothing more than a relaxation technique, can allow some people to sink a bit below the line, a bit into their unconscious, where they may discover the forgotten or the repressed and where suggestion can sometimes be planted.
I told Gene I thought I might be a bit too much of a skeptic or cynic to be a very good subject, but I'd think about it.
"Is the Gene Brooke in your story the same one who works at this school?" asks the dog-faced boy.
"Yes," I say.
"Then how does he know Carolyn O'Connor? Did he used to work in the city?"
"Actually, he doesn't know Carolyn O'Connor, or didn't then, and he's never worked in the city. I just rearranged the pieces a little for the sake of the story."
"I don't understand," says Nick.
"Well, it just works better that way," I say.
"I'm not sure I agree," says the girl whose hair is blue today, "and I definitely don't buy this hypnotism stuff. That sounds hokey to me. Sounds like Seinfeld or something."
"But that's the part that's true," I say. "Gene really does use hypnotism and he really did use it on me."
"Now let's see," says Nick. "You put something in that isn't true because it works better, and you put something in that doesn't work because it's true. I'm not sure you can have it both ways."
"Sure I can; it's my story," I say.
"Isn't it my story, too?" asks Nick.
"You as the reader? Well, yes," I say.
"What if I don't buy it?" asks Nick.
"Do you buy it?" I say.
"I'm not sure," says Nick.
"So Gene Brooke is our Gene Brooke, and Carolyn O'Connor's real, too?" asks the girl with blue hair.
"Yes."
"And you say they know each other when they really don't?"
"Well, they didn't. They do now," I say.
"I'm confused," says the blue-haired girl.
"And you can make that happen just because it's your story?" asks someone.
"Yes."
"Okay," says the dog-faced boy, "if the story belongs to the writer, and I'm the writer, then why can't I write anything I want to just like you? Why do I have to write this stupid double-plot story?"
"Is that a rhetorical question?" I ask.
"No. I'd really like to know."
"I'll give you a serious answer if you really want one."
"I do."
"For one thing, the double-plot story forces you to be aware of the narrative voice, forces you to think about the relationship between the narrator and the other characters for another, and it helps in story development, helps your story to be dynamic and not static. A lot of times beginning writers have trouble making a story happen. This assignment forces you to make things happen," I say.
"I don't want to be forced, I just want to write. Can't you just let us alone to write?" says the blue-haired girl.
"Well, that would be a bit like teaching you to swim by pushing you into the water. My job is to show you a few strokes."
"But this is supposed to be 'creative' writing," says Nick. "That suggests freedom to me. It's more like 'restrictive' writing when we have to do your assignments all the time."
"Then make up your own assignments."
"Can we do that?"
"Sure. I'd prefer that you do that. The more responsibility you take for the course, the more you'll get out of it. But your assignments have to be as good as mine, and I have to approve them. Write them out. Use mine as models, if you wish. Make sure that each one has a specific stated goal or goals and a specific purpose, and the purpose cannot be to exorcise your adolescent angst or explore formless, amorphous, and misguided teenage impressions of love, lust, or any related topic. Sorry. I mean goals and purposes that have to do with the craft of writing, the technical discipline of writing."
"Can I ask another question? If this is a writing course, why are we doing all this reading?" "Well, you know, writers read other writers just like golfers look at each others' swings and young surgeons learn from old surgeons, and artists study under other artists. It's kind of how you learn."
"Learn what, though?" asks Nick. "To imitate other writers? What if you want to be
completely original?"
"Well, most people would say that it's impossible to be completely original, that all work is derived from what came before it. That's the current word: derivative. Everything is derivative, nothing is original."
"I refuse to believe that," says Nick.
"Well, of course you do, and you should. You're eighteen years old. You're inventing the world as you go. Other people would say you're reinventing the world. Later you may agree with them, or you may not. It's like sex. Every generation thinks it invents sex and all the words that go with it. It's difficult to think of your parents doing those things—"
"Please."
"—or using those words, but they obviously did. Every generation is pretty sure it invents all the dirty words, but they are some of the oldest words in any language."
"Okay," says Nick, "what's your story derived from?"
"Mine?"
"The girl who got killed in the car."
"Well, I don't know. I really hadn't thought of it."
"Aha! The principle applies to everyone but you, then."
"No. It applies to me. I just hadn't thought of it. It's not a conscious thing."
"Don't you think your story's completely original?" asks Nick.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean mixing fact and fiction like you do, moving the pieces around, sort of blurring the line between what's true and what isn't."
"Well, I may think my story's original," I say, "but it probably is not."
"Isn't that pretty important?" asks the dog-faced boy.
"What?"
"That it's probably not original."
I say, "I think it's more important that I think it is."
"Then you're saying illusion is more important than reality," says Nick.
"What I'm saying is that very often illusion is all we have."
8
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TRAVEL WRITING
