The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  “When Charlie was eight years old,” my father said, “he came to me at the start of summer vacation with a question he’d been pondering. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, and in the most serious way, ‘that by the end of the summer, I’ll be old enough to go out into the world to seek my fortune?’”

  “Oh my,” Seana said.

  “And let us not forget Gerald Durrell,” my father said. “Charlie adored Durrell, so that when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say he was going to be an animal trainer and work in a zoo. Gerald—Lawrence’s brother—was a zookeeper at times, you see, as well as a naturalist and environmentalist.”

  “I hope he was a better writer than his brother,” Seana said. “Have you ever read those Alexandria novels? Impossibly soppy. Soppy, sloppy, soggy—over-written, noxious, romantic, pretentious…”

  “But what don’t you like about them?” my father asked, though when he smiled to show he’d meant his question ironically, Seana didn’t smile with him. “Given the impressions his early reading made on him,” my father continued, “small wonder Charlie has moved around so frequently, and has become so enchanted by the world he’s discovered in the Far East.”

  Holding tightly to the stem of her wine glass, Seana leaned across the table. “So tell me something, Charlie,” she said. “Do you enjoy seeing beautiful landscapes despoiled and ravaged? Do you take pleasure in seeing men, women, and children exploited and driven to early graves in order to provide lubricants for our machines, and poisons for our food and arteries? Do you take pride in your portion of responsibility for the deadly conditions that prevail in the enchanted world you’ve been inhabiting?”

  “Of course not,” I said, and resisted the urge to start talking about just what I did feel about Borneo and palm oil. “It’s complicated,” I said. “If you’d been there you’d understand that it’s very complicated…”

  “What isn’t?” Seana said. “Nevertheless, our conversation has served to put me in mind once again of George Sand, a woman rarely far from my thoughts, and in particular—the obvious inspiration for the accusatory grilling I’ve just subjected you to—of her dying words: Ne détruisez pas la verdure.”

  “Do not destroy the greenery,” my father said.

  “I don’t need a translator,” Seana snapped. “And ‘greenery’ stinks—doesn’t begin to capture what she meant.”

  “When Seana was considering continuing on for a doctorate,” my father explained, “she talked of writing her dissertation on George Sand.”

  “On Sand and Eliot,” Seana said, correcting him. “The two great Georges. Gorgeous Georges? Curious Georges? Our own Ms. Oates notwithstanding, George Sand, you will recall—Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and for greater part of her adult life, the Baroness Dudevant—was the most prolific female author in history. Nobody reads her anymore, though I would point out that Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, a man of exceptional erudition and discernment—like you, Professor Max—admired her enormously.”

  “As did many men,” my father said.

  “Truly and duly noted,” Seana said, her voice slurred. “Pagello above all.” Seana turned to me. “Pagello was an Italian doctor—a country doctor, but not out of Kafka, and he fell in love with Sand, and she transported him with her across Italy and lived with him in Paris, and then she ditched him, and he returned to Venice, where he married and fathered children. He died at the age of ninety-one, nearly sixty years later. Your father once considered writing a novel about him.”

  “That’s true,” Max said.

  “Actually, I know who you’re talking about,” I said. “I saw a movie about him where he gets to shag Juliet Binoche. A piss-poor movie, if you ask me.”

  “A novel manqué? my father asked.

  “Mutilé would be more like it,” Seana said. “And as for you, Max—didn’t I hear you say it was past your bedtime?”

  Seana stood, steadied herself by leaning on the table, said that it was true that she and I had things to talk about, and that, to prepare herself, she would now proceed to brew a cup of coal-black coffee.

  She swayed a bit as she made her way to the kitchen, stopping at my chair, where she touched my shoulder briefly, even as my father said again what a joy it was to have me home. He wished us both pleasant dreams, and headed upstairs.

  The list Seana gave me—titles with brief one-sentence explanatory tags attached to them, like log-lines you see in television listings for movies—was in her handwriting, which was exquisitely graceful, a skill of small value, she asserted, and one shared by most girls who’d survived a childhood of Catholic schools. My father’s full list—titles with and without the tags—was extensive, she said. Amazing, actually—page after page of titles and snippets in search of authors and stories—so that what she’d done was to choose a baker’s dozen that on a first reading seemed the most obviously promising, and, more to the point, ones that she liked to imagine Max had had in mind for her—for novels he imagined she might imagine into being were she to come across them one day.

  What she wanted from me was not my opinion—how could one have an opinion of an unwritten novel that might be based on a title and a squiggle of words?—but my immediate and, more important, my unreflective reactions.

  Because what made me an ideal collaborator, she added pointedly, was that she believed me capable of a truly thoughtless response.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She stared past me with glazed eyes, then blinked. “Okay,” she said, as if she were waking up. “You’re right. Okay then. I’ve thought about this and here’s what I’ve come to—that I’ve never collaborated with anyone before, so I’m doubtless wary of doing so, and covering my wariness—my sadness? my fear?—with aggression. A familiar pattern because—and I’m on a slight roll now, Charlie, so don’t interrupt, please—unlike Mister James, a writer more generously sociable than most, who wrote that the port from which he set out was the essential loneliness of life—hardly an unusual journey for an Irishman—I’ve always believed my compass was set in an opposite direction: that the port to which I’ve been heading was the essential loneliness of my life. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes,” she repeated, and she pushed several pieces of paper across the table. “So here’s the list—what I wanted to ask you about. And now that I’ve given it to you, do you know what that makes me?”

  “List-less?”

  “It is apparent that you are more your father’s son than either of you understand.”

  “Maybe. But consider this too—that because you made your deal with him, he’s become listless too.”

  She tapped on the list with the eraser end of a pencil. “To the task at hand, young man,” she said. “Read them and then tell me, please: Which ones appeal most? Which ones seem of no interest? Which ones inspire your curiosity, and—question numéro uno—which one do you think I should use as the basis for my next novel—or, to make it easier on you, why don’t you choose three, say—but in ranked order of preference.”

  I picked up the pages.

  “Is that too much to ask?” she said. “Too much responsibility for an innocent young guy like you?”

  “Innocent and thoughtless,” I said, correcting her.

  “Oh Charlie,” she said. “You shouldn’t take my words as seriously as I sometimes do. I was just trying to get a rise out of you. My apologies—okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  This is the list she gave me:

  Pagello’s Surgery. Memoirs of an aging Italian country doctor who had once been George Sand’s lover.

  A Missing Year. A veteran of the Korean War, suffering intermittently from suicidal impulses, returns home to Kansas in order to marry a fellow soldier’s widowed wife even while he struggles to come to terms with the death of that soldier, an act of murder he may or may not have imagined.

  Hector on 9/11. Story of a Puerto Rican teenager who, on the day the World
Trade Center towers come down, has an exceptionally successful 24 hours of romance with his social studies teacher and several frightened teenage girls, all of whom are in extreme need of tenderness and consolation.

  Tag Sale. A retired professor at a New England college organizes a tag sale in which he attempts to sell material from his unpublished and/or abandoned novels, and the ways in which this act affects the destinies of people dear to him.

  Sky Captain. An Irish priest, chaplain to the crew of a merchant marine training ship, dies in a Marseilles brothel and is transported back across the Atlantic in the ship’s freezer among sides of beef, cartons of hamburgers, and crates of dead chickens.

  Hearts and Minds. A fifty-five-year-old chemist, in line for a Nobel prize and in need of a heart transplant, receives the heart of a 19-year-old black woman who has died in an automobile crash; following the transplant, he abandons his scientific research in favor of the life of a bon vivant.

  Her Private Train. An historical novel based on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 wolf hunt—the tale told primarily from the p.o.v. of his daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth—for which hunt TR set out for the territory of Oklahoma in a private train of 22 cars, with 70 fox hounds, 67 greyhounds, 60 saddle and packhorses, 44 hunters, beaters, wranglers, journalists, and one woman.

  Charlie’s Story. A charming young man in his mid-thirties takes up residence in an international city in the Far East, and becomes involved with a less than charming man whose fate has (wonderful) trans formative effects on our hero.

  The James Brothers. In heaven, Henry and William join with Frank and Jesse to steal the pearly gates.

  Max Baer and the Star of David. The tale of Max Baer’s relationship with a black couple who, before and after he becomes heavyweight champion—a Star of David first adorning his trunks when he defeats Hitler’s boxer, Max Schmeling, in Yankee Stadium—serve him faithfully as Man Friday and housekeeper, and in which tale we discover that the couple are not husband and wife but brother and sister, and that their child is Max Baer’s son.

  Make-A-Wish. A gifted young violinist, knowing she has but a year to live, shows up at her mentor’s door and declares that, like those children who get to meet their favorite athlete or rock star before they die, she has chosen to live with him for the duration.

  Jules and Jim Go to White’s Castle. In 1947, two young Brooklyn Dodger fans make a pilgrimage to Maine to visit their favorite writer, E. B. White, in order to persuade White to write a book in which he has the boys befriend Jackie Robinson, thereby enabling Robinson to survive a signal moment in his first year in the Major Leagues.

  We Gather Together. A Thanksgiving reunion wherein the children and grandchildren of a warring Irish family bring the family back together on the occasion of the silver anniversary of their parents’ divorce.

  The story I kept thinking about on our way across Massachusetts and up toward Tenants Harbor was Make-A-Wish , even though—because?—I had not chosen it as one of the three I thought would make the best novel for Seana to work on. The three I chose were Charlie’s Story, Tag Sale, and A Missing Year, mainly because they contained elements I could relate to from Max’s life or my own.

  Which, Seana had declared while we sat at the kitchen table my first night home, had nothing to do with whether or not any of them would make a good novel. Because something had happened to you, or might happen to you, had zilch to do with what made fiction work. In fiction—this is what she said she’d learned from my father—imagination and empathy: being able to conjure up lives and times unlike your own—were everything.

  “Does that mean that what I’ve been believing all these years—that Triangle was based on your relationship with your mother and father—had no truth to it?”

  “Don’t try to get funny with me, young man,” she said. “My life’s my life, and my stories are my stories.”

  She fixed us tumblers of Drambuie over ice, then came around the table and sat next to me, an arm across my shoulder as if we were old schoolyard buddies, and said that she’d been thinking about Nick’s death, and had decided it was a bad idea for me to go up to Maine by myself, and that she was going to go with me.

  “Even if I ask you to?” I said.

  “Even if you ask me to,” she said, and then, before I could try to kiss her—and oh boy did I want to!—she drained her drink, chucked me on the arm, and left me in the kitchen. I waved good-bye to her after she was gone, but instead of thinking of her sweet mouth, or trying to recall what it felt like the time we did kiss, or imagining what it would be like if I went into her room later, lay down beside her, and began kissing her—I found myself picturing the two of us arriving at Trish’s house, with Trish embracing me, and the two of us kissing.

  What I’d also begun wondering about, from the moment I read the Make-A-Wish synopsis, was whether the story about the violinist was really about Seana, and if, like the woman in the story, Seana had come to our house in Northampton because, knowing she was dying, she wanted to be near her mentor during the time she had left. The idea for the novel had been my father’s, but I had to wonder if Seana had either confided her situation in him at some point, or if he somehow guessed that the only reason she would take up nesting rights in our house was because it was the one place where she felt safe—at home—and because she wanted to be close to him on her way out. I stood, felt my knees wobble, and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady myself. The room tilted to one side, and then to the other, as if it were a ship going through high, rolling waves, and I told myself that I’d done much too much wondering for one evening, and that it was time to go to sleep so that I might, if I got lucky, become lost in a wild and lovely storm-tossed sea of dreams.

  After we’d made our way across the small cuff of New Hampshire that connected Massachusetts to Maine, and stopped for lunch in a shoreline diner outside Kennebunkport, I remembered what I’d been thinking the night before, and asked Seana if Make-A-Wish had anything to do with her.

  “It was your father’s idea, not mine,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “But you said you thought he might have imagined some of the stories—at least the ones you showed me—in part because it was his way of giving you notions for novels that you imagined he might have imagined would be novels you might imagine.”

  “Don’t get meta-fictional on me,” she said.

  “Meta-who?”

  “Actually, if you need reassurance, let it be known that Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan subjects herself to regular check-ups—cervix, breasts, colon, heart, lungs—the works—and that the best medical teams have failed to discover anything to worry about. Which means I have to keep writing.”

  “But I thought you love to write. You told me that nothing gives you more pleasure than writing.”

  “I love to write,” she said, pointing a fork at me. “But you’re missing the point, Charlie.” She tapped the flat side of the fork against the side of her head. “Use your noodle, fella. Whose story is it?”

  “Oh,” I said. And then again: “Oh.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “But he seems fine.”

  “So do we all, some days.”

  “But,” I began, and leaned forward. “I mean, do you really think that’s what it’s about?”

  “No,” she said.

  “But why—?”

  She shrugged and lifted her coffee mug, as if in a toast to Max, then sat back. “Who knows?” she said again. “Probably because I enjoy playing you—playing with you?—seeing what’s going on behind those moist brown eyes of yours. I used to love it when Max had to be out of town and he asked me to babysit you—he said I was there to house-sit so that you wouldn’t be offended and think he thought you couldn’t take care of yourself. But it was the same then: when you’re especially happy or sad—or scared—your eyes have the same beguiling quality your father’s eyes have, did you know that?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But all that stuff about ports and loneline
ss—what was that all about? Some perverse way of… of…?”

  “Stuck for words, Charlie?”

  “Let’s just forget it, okay?” I said. I picked up the check. “Let’s just forget it and blow this joint.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not that funny,” I said. “You’re weird—I’ll give you that—and—like some of the characters in your books—with a distinctive mean streak. For sure. But you’re not funny.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

  A short while later, in the car, Seana fell asleep, her head against the window, a rolled up sweater for a pillow. She snored lightly, her mouth open, and I tried to stay angry at her for making me believe, if only for a moment, that my father was living on borrowed time, but then it occurred to me that maybe he really was, and that when she saw my reaction, she had changed course.

  I wondered, though: What difference did it make if I knew for sure—if he knew for sure—if he and Seana knew for sure, or if none of us knew anything? I tried to imagine what he might do if he did know—if he’d make any changes in the way he lived, and decided he wouldn’t, which was when I realized that the idea of getting rid of the unused parts of his writing life might have come from the knowledge—and fear—that he wouldn’t be here much longer, though a second later this led to the thought that the tag sale might have only been what it was: the kind of thing Max did now and then for no other reason than that he felt like doing it.

  North of Portland, I turned off the main highway—Seana was awake now, but quiet—and took a detour west toward Naples so we could swing by the place where I’d gone to summer camp as a kid—Camp Kingswood—and where I’d been a counselor the first two summers I was at UMass. I’d been to Maine a bunch of times in the years since I’d been a camper and counselor there—Nick and Trish were married in Maine, and the year Nick and I graduated from UMass, we’d gone up there and had a wild few days with a group of friends, eight or ten of us, partying, drinking, and screwing our asses off.