My heart flipped like a dying fish. I had no idea what to say when my turn came. It struck me that coming back had been a terrible idea, and that the only sensible thing would be to grab my backpack and make a run for it.
“And you?” Suddenly Ms. Forché was there, leaning her head around the row of students ahead of me. It was my turn. One or two people turned in their seats.
“Actually I wasn’t selected to be part of the class.” No one said anything, so I went on. “I very much want to learn how to write better poems; I’m sure the ones I sent in were terrible, but I don’t have any idea how to make them better. I was wondering if I might audit the class.” A woman near me cast her eyes down in embarrassment.
Too earnest, I thought. Nothing like bald pleas from the uninvited. Ms. Forché advanced down the aisle. “Well, I think poets sometimes cultivate mystery about the form. And it’s not useful.” She paused for a moment and looked around the room with a keen eye. I could feel that the classroom, the whole atmosphere of the university, was alien to her, that she was looking at us from a remove. She turned toward me. “I’d be happy to have you join us.”
Later, when the class had dispersed, I went to the front to have her sign my enrollment form. “Listen, I really appreciate the chance to sit in.”
“Why do you want to audit?” she asked. “Do you want to participate or not?”
I was taken aback. “Of course, I would love to enroll. I just didn’t think—”
She signed the form and handed it to me. “Enroll then. I’ll see you next week.”
I’m sure there were many times when my fellow classmates wished they had piped up that first day and objected to my intrusion. The poems that I submitted over the quarter were appalling. They weren’t grounded in anything real. Once, I brought in a poem that began with my feeling the pulse in my neck and went on to describe a kind of fish— bloodfish, I coined them—that swam through my veins. I had written it at my typewriter at the anatomy department, while Benny sawed off arms and legs across the hall.
When I read the poem out loud in class, a heavy silence fell over the group. I had hope that this was the long inbreath of appreciation. But then a man named Bruce, an accomplished poet, took up my poem, fingering the corners gently as if their sharpness might lend him words. “Are there such things as bloodfish?” he finally asked, clearing his throat.
“Well, no,” I said, feeling scalded. “I made them up.”
Bruce nodded politely. It all made sense to him now.
Years later, I would come across a line from Wallace Stevens that made clear the trouble with my poems. “The imagination,” Stevens wrote, “loses vitality when it ceases to adhere to what is real.” My real life seemed dull, and I was desperate to make something vivid. To what purpose, I had no idea.
***
Carolyn, as she insisted we call her, didn’t seem well, though I couldn’t say in what way. Even in the sunshine, her hair gave off little light, and she winced quickly now and then, as if at some internal pain. When I saw her walking across campus with the professor who acted as her patron, an association that he clearly seemed to think reflected well on him, she carried herself with the deliberate gait of someone who has been ill.
I imagined it might have been an illness picked up on one of her far-flung journeys. She had been on a tour of some of the world’s war zones—El Salvador, South Africa, Beirut—and she seemed steeped in their desperate moods. Now and then she’d let a story slip out: while in Soweto, her husband, a photojournalist, saw a man tied up by a rival faction, ringed by old tires, and set on fire. This friend had been tortured, that one jailed.
Her poems took up these stories, and it was something she’d taken flack for—writing of material not her own. But what I took away from her poetry was not politics but language, the shapeliness of her phrases.
Still, studying with her, I sometimes felt the weight of the century’s barbarism clamoring outside the poems. My story would always be a story of privilege; it was a question of being a lucky person and what to do with it. While I circled around writing poetry, I waged a battle in my head. What was the use of art when the world was full of trouble? I liked poetry, but I didn’t think that it made me a better person, or that it made my life hold together on different terms. And art that set out to change people’s lives—it would take a genius to conceal that much intention.
In the back of my mind was an inscription my father wrote in a book he gave me when I was nine: “There are two ways to live your life: for yourself or for other people.” I doubt he meant it as a chide. He held up a mirror, as any parent does, and what I saw there was his vision of me: wiry, tough, funny, a little brash, a little lazy and prone to forgetfulness, but smart, with a big heart—all in all, a good kid. But when I read that phrase my spirits sank. I knew then that I was selfish, and in the years intervening my judgment hadn’t changed. Poetry seemed like a frivolous pursuit.
Imagine my thrill when I came across a stray line from Heidegger: “Poetry is the most rigorous form of thought.” It sounds defensive to me now, perhaps because I once used it as defense. I had no idea what that sentence meant or what else Heidegger had to say, but I plucked the phrase out of context and laid it in front of me—a sandbag for my bunker.
It wasn’t that my father or Leslie ever came out and said art was superfluous. On the contrary, my father once spoke of his feelings directly. We were at Mario’s again, and somehow, over the salads and house wine, the subject came up.
“I don’t believe that art has to carry a proletarian message,” my father said, choosing his words. “I mean the Soviets got into that for a while—that there was no such thing as art for art’s sake—and I think that it’s wrong. I do think all art is political, in some sense, either in the way it engages or doesn’t engage on political terms. But I don’t think that’s the only level on which art should be measured.”
He certainly never behaved like a censor. He loved entertainment—sappy movies, television. He followed sports, in particular his old New York teams, with a singular passion. But still, the bulk of his energy was devoted to political aims, and I watched my parents far more closely than I listened to them. The work of my father’s life, if it could be reduced to words, said that one must apply oneself to human suffering in the most concrete of ways. To avert one’s eyes was to be some form of coward. I had the feeling that poetry—things told slant, as Emily Dickinson called it—was a fancy way of averting one’s eyes.
Just before my college graduation, my father invited me to a play, whose name I’ve now forgotten, downtown at the Mark Taper Forum: “It might be sold out, but they always have a few tickets on sale an hour before curtain. I figure we can go down there early, wait in line, then go to dinner before the show.”
From the moment he picked me up, I was roiling with old resentments, over his preoccupation, his way of sighing as if the world were on his shoulders. He talked about his work. “I’ve been through a very rough period. Trying to finish the book and feeling like I need to do everything myself, the promotion, the publicity. I think this could be a very important book. A real tool for studying the labor movement.”
I stared out the window as he drove downtown, only half listening. He had made this gesture, and still I was bucking to spoil the evening.
While my father waited in line for tickets, I wandered toward the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, hands stuffed in my pockets. I was halfway across the courtyard when a stream of water shot out of the pavement, not six inches from my face. For one heart-stopping instant I thought it was a broken water main. Then all around me, out of the slate, more streams rose in counterpoint, water stiff as lengths of rebar, falling apart in the air and pooling at my feet. I had walked halfway into a minimalist fountain: a suite of holes bored in the concrete and a slight concavity to catch the flow. That fountain pissed me off, as did everything else that evening. I backed out of range and sat on a nearby bench, hoping to watch someone else get soaked.
&n
bsp; My father came out to find me. “It’s going to be a while. The tickets don’t go on sale for half an hour. Why don’t you keep me company?”
His eagerness set my teeth on edge. “You know what, I can’t go see this play.”
“Come on, sweetie. I know you’ll like it.”
“No. I don’t care if it’s good,” I said, suddenly barefaced in front of him. “We need to talk.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice softening. “I know a restaurant nearby. Why don’t we go have dinner?”
We walked the few blocks in silence, neither one of us knowing what to say. When we were seated at a table, and the waiter had brought menus and bread, we managed to look each other in the eye.
“So what’s going on?” he asked me.
“I’m pissed at you,” I said.
I saw his face working to stay smooth. “About what?”
What was I pissed about? Things so old, so layered, that to speak about them seemed useless. “Everything—that you always get your way, that I can never win an argument. I’m sick of how you’re always case-making: that I have to have reasons why I feel the things I feel.”
“That’s not true, Lisa. Come on. I listen to you. I have tremendous respect for you. I disagree with you sometimes, but I always take you seriously.”
He was right. I was overstating things. It only made me feel wilder.
“You mean the world to me,” my father went on. “I mean my life boils down to two things—my work and my family—and I think I’ve done a very good job of balancing the two.”
That word— balance —struck me like hammer. “Then how come you left?” I don’t know how I veered into the heart of things. But there it was. Eighteen years later, and that question was still on my lips.
The waiter came to take our order, his smile dying as he saw my tear-stained face. My father shot him a nervous glance: “We’ll need a little more time.”
“Are you ashamed of me?” I asked, when the waiter had left. I couldn’t stand such propriety from a man who once did yoga in department stores. Now that I had crossed the line, I was feeling reckless, ready to say anything.
“Of course not,” he said. “Look, what happened when you were little—” He broke off. What happened then, that whole era, seemed to strain the limits of words. “I felt terrible to leave you, but it was a very important moment in history, and there was so much at stake. I remember taking you to the park and explaining to you about the war—how our country was bombing these innocent people. And you were wonderful. You listened and you asked me if there were fathers and daughters over there like you and me—god, were you three? I remember you being so thoughtful—and I said, yes, there were babies over there and I wanted to help them. And you said you understood. That if I had to go away you understood.”
I looked at him, framed against the restaurant’s wood paneling, so calm in his recounting. I had my hands out on the tablecloth, and my whole body shook with terror at what I was about to say. “You didn’t have to go. You wanted to go.”
He looked defiant. “That’s true. I was doing what I thought was right.” Then he took a deep breath and sighed. “Look,” my father said, “I adored you. I didn’t want to go to prison. And as soon as I got out I came back, and I think I was a pretty good father. I tried very hard to make up for the time we missed, driving up to Ann’s, putting a lot of energy into our summers together. I don’t know what to say. The work I do, I do for you kids. I have three copies of each of my books on the shelf—one for each of you. And I hope someday you’ll look at what I’ve done and be proud of your dad.”
“Look at your books?” I couldn’t stop shaking. This was the difference in how we measured our lives. “You’re my father. What I’ll remember is our time together.”
He was quiet for a while. “You know I feel very guilty about how much that hurt you, my leaving. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I was twenty-four years old when you were born, and I was still trying to figure my life out. I always tried to be conscious of you, but I’ve been on my own trip, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing—I don’t think the only positive value I can have as a parent is to keep everything safe and stable. We’re living in a very dangerous time, families are falling apart under the strain, and I’m trying to do something about that.” He stopped and looked at me, searching for some sign that I heard him, that I understood. “I hoped that you could learn something from my struggle.”
Twelve
AFTER THAT DINNER, things seemed easier between my father and me. Easier for being out in the open. In my final few months of college, I found that I called home more often, that our dinners in Westwood didn’t leave me drained. It would be years before the conversation we started that night would be finished, but I felt a weight lift off me just to have begun.
Meanwhile, school was ending and I had choices to make. I was still thinking that I wanted to be an anthropologist. Still thinking, but I had my doubts. It’s easy to say, in hindsight, that it all came down to language. I remember going to Powell Library to read dissertations by women who had done ethnographic studies in Malaysia and Bangladesh. It was plodding stuff. So little of the life there came through: no chicken squawk or food smells, no sense of the way people talked. What did come through, here and there, was the loneliness: “This area certainly warrants further study, but in the eleventh month of my stay, I contracted cholera and was forced to conclude my field work.” I tried to read on, but my eyes glazed over. Late at night, in a carrel deep in the stacks, a leaky hut in monsoon country sounded like exile.
Still, something in that vision must have compelled me. Late in my senior year, I decided I would travel through Asia. I told myself it was a trip fitting a future anthropologist, but I think it was mostly an impulse to see things bent and strange. I wanted a complete torquing of dailiness—the dress, the clothes, the type of shoes, the plates, the shape of the drinking fountains, how one hailed a bus, the strange fruits, literally. I wanted a wilder life, and a test of my mettle, and in the bargain I thought I might come up with a possible site for a field study.
That spring, I applied to graduate schools in anthropology and also for a traveling fellowship sponsored through the honors department: ten thousand dollars of unrestricted travel money, no final project or thesis required. I knew about that award for a year, and wanted it so badly I could taste it, yet I waited until the day the application was due to type up the essay in the computer lounge. “Through my major in history and secondary focus in anthropology I have become interested in the intersection between historical practice and anthropological methodology. By combining a structural, historical approach to examining social structures, class conflicts, and the comparison of pre-capitalist and capitalist forms of production with an anthropological systems approach which examines the relations between environment, technology and demographic growth, I would like to study the differences between socialist and market economies’ efforts at agricultural development.”
I may have been bored by other people’s turgid prose, but I waxed on myself when I thought the occasion called for it. Those suffocating, generalized phrases rolled from my fingers, but I had a harder time with the particulars. I spotted a woman two terminals down who looked like she might have been from India.
“Excuse me,” I asked her, “do you know where in India they harvest the most wheat?”
She laughed. “Uttar Pradesh, I think.”
In it went: “I plan to spend two months in India visiting Bengal, where rice is farmed, and Uttar Pradesh, which is primarily a wheat production area.”
That cobbled-together document got me into the finals, along with two other students. We were all to be vetted by a panel of professors. I didn’t prepare much for that interview. I didn’t know how to prepare. I thought they might ask me about my specific travel plans, how I would get from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and that sort of thing, so I rushed to the library the morning of the interview and photocopied some maps. Many of them
were so old they predated partition, but I folded them neatly and brought them to the conference room in the honors department, where four professors faced me from the end of a long table. After a few introductions, a dour older man posed the first question: “What exactly is the intersection between historical practice and anthropological methodology?”
The maps wouldn’t help me there. I hadn’t the faintest idea what to say. I blundered into an answer, losing my train of thought, freezing for whole seconds in search of a word, so that another professor, a kindly woman, took pity and tried to put words in my mouth. The older man, my interlocutor, didn’t look at me once for the rest of the hour. He had heard enough.
So of course I lost the fellowship, but decided I would go to India after all; I’d just have to pay my own way. I became more of a scrimper than I already was—living on Top Ramen and peanut butter, buying only thrift-store clothes, working longer hours at the anatomy department—and six months after I graduated I had collected enough to last me half a year in India.
I wanted Mau to travel with me, but he balked at the itinerary. India wasn’t his first choice. He was leaning toward South America, where he could speak the language, where he might do more than just gawk. Unlike me, he didn’t seem to be frightened of traveling alone; rather, he was frightened that the rigors of the road would put an end to us. Better to put an end to us now, he figured, so he wouldn’t end up stranded in Rajasthan, nursing a broken heart, when he could have been a footloose bachelor in Peru. Perhaps we both needed some air. We’d been together three years and were barely out of our teens. It made a lot of sense—our relationship was already showing its strain—but this decision to go on separate journeys strained us further. We held on during the last month before we set off out of laziness and residual affections. And whenever our old oppositions reared their heads—my clinginess and operatic emotion, his impatience and inward moods—we remembered that they’d soon put us on opposite sides of the globe.
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