I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  In private, Jane and I spoke about moving—who would not?—and maybe renting a different house, trying to give full voice to the financial and psychological reasons. Yet try as we might, we mostly talked around it. It was very difficult and painful not only to speak about what had happened, but to admit having been blown so far off our familiar courses in life. What is more, our responses to this murder-suicide had revealed some aspects of our individual natures that were surprisingly different—not opposed to each other, exactly, but quite different. In every vital sense, we were on the same page. But I suspect, too, we were loath to credit that sordid and pernicious act as necessitating anything but a kind of perfect togetherness in order for us to endure. In the end this too would pass; still, since July 16, 2003, each day had required that we fend off estrangements from familiar life, even if they couldn’t all be named.

  While we convinced each other that doing the radio broadcast with Susan Stamberg would, among other things, exhibit to our friends that we were doing okay, we in fact both had deeply rooted reservations, but mutual encouragement was more important. No regrets there at all, none. However, when I listened to the complete interview, I heard the contrast between Jane’s pointillistic honesty and my own impressionistic responses. I recognized Jane’s use of an intimate house/body metaphor and my own reliance on ancient parable and literary quotation to articulate what I myself could not. During that interview and in life in general, I was so afraid of self-inflicted despondency that I would outsource all useful insight to others, rather than claim ownership of any original thinking, of how to feel things deeply and say things clearly enough for myself. I started to feel beaten down; all of my reasoning and emotions were generic. However, I did know one thing: out of some misguided attempt to remain stoical, I was making myself physically sick, habituated as I had become to keeping so much sadness inside, along with the seething anger toward Reetika Vazirani. Better that I should have stood on the coast of Nova Scotia and screamed.

  On the far more healthy end of the spectrum, Jane, a woman whose house was so violated, was able to dignify her own feelings and pay forthright attention to her concern that all this pain might have lasting effects on our trust and love for each other, and even destroy parts of our very souls. And come to think of it, that first time I listened alone to the radio interview, I tried to gain some knowledge from it, to see if we ourselves were okay. And I thought, well, yes and no.

  As for the “wisdom of the ages” stuff, my therapist said, “For all the lovely altruism of that proverb of David Mamet’s you keep referring to—‘If you are walking down the road and see a house on fire . . .’—all well and good, Mr. Norman. But in fact it was your house that was violated. You aren’t victims, nor are you suggesting anything of the sort, but it was your house. If you want to rely on a platitude, why not try ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ and see what connection to the truth that provides.”

  An unforgivable thing had happened. And though we were still in an emotional limbo, life moved on and life moved on. We had book parties, Emma’s sleepovers, dinner parties. We had a number of literary-work sojourns apart, Jane and I, and saving-grace periods of time in Vermont. A slow, slow return to normal life.

  The thing was, since our house—our actual address—had been made so public, a lot of people we had never met knew where to send mail. In the old life, when any letter arrived, I would open it right away, but after the murder-suicide, I came to dread the mail. If a letter had an unfamiliar postmark or return address, I’d hesitate, sometimes for days, even weeks. One night, looking in a desultory way at a bunch of letters in a basket on my desk, I simply tossed them all out unopened.

  Our house was inundated with letters, telephone calls, and e-mails, and some people posted online treatises about what had, or what they thought had, happened there. I could only imagine the types of dialogues about the murder-suicide that went on throughout the literary community. This was human nature, I suppose, the human condition. Speculation, hearsay, eulogies, recriminations. I tried to look at all this as a kind of choral arrangement, a tremendous singing out of innumerable and very conflicted condolences. After all, the phenomenon of poet-suicide, historically speaking, has always been a magnet for all manner of inquiry and debate and hagiography. This public outpouring of emotion was perhaps an attempt to compose the fullest, if inevitably fragmented, presentation of Reetika Vazirani’s life and put it to rest. Still, I feel obligated to express my dumbfoundedness that Jehan was so seldom mentioned. The novelist Percival Everett said, straight from the heart, “Why couldn’t she have at least let her son live? I am still angry because there were so many ways not to hurt the child. I am sick with the knowledge that his sweet life is over.”

  Many of these communiqués contained what often felt like a violating sort of presumptuousness, as if there were some shared conviction that my family somehow needed or wanted to collate other people’s lettered, and unlettered, opinions into meaningful comprehension of the childhood, upbringing, failed relationships, ambitions, and secrets of this near-total stranger Reetika Vazirani, and as if we had a kinship fascination with the connection—always dubious—between art and madness. (One Washington-area writer, who had claimed to be an intimate of Reetika Vazarani, but in fact had not even known her address, said to me in a bookstore, “A lot of my friends consider me a kind of lay therapist, in case you’re interested.”)

  However, I would also say, even given the sporadic and modest attention I paid to such things, that on the whole these communiqués shared a popular sentiment that Reetika Vazirani’s cultural bifurcation (her primary family left Pujab in 1968, when she was six) had somehow mutated into a full-blown bipolar illness. Concerning the so-called (in her own journal) “immigrant condition”—a transitory heart—Reetika Vazirani’s sister, Deepika, thought that in her writings her sister “magnified her experience. Maybe she needed a compelling, even fashionable subject. Whatever the reason, Otherness became an enduring theme.” And a lot of people theorized that Reetika Vazirani was somehow fatally trapped between viciously contending elements: there was sheer ambition (“Create a buzz around yourself—that’s what I did”), there were money worries intensifying the difficulties of single motherhood, and there was antecedent madness (her father had committed suicide). Add to all that her despair about her relationship with Jehan’s father, a distinguished poet who lived apart from her and her son.

  Perhaps most predictably, literary ambulance chasers—not prone to studied considerations that should better take years—had all sorts of insights about Reetika Vazirani’s lines and stanzas, some of whom suggesting that, when closely deciphered, what would come to light was that her writing all along had exhibited, as one correspondent put it, a “posthumous aspect,” as if it consisted of predated keenings from the afterlife. However, no poetry is written posthumously; it is only published so, and to suggest that she had clairvoyant powers is as mindless as saying, mistakenly, suicide-murder. No, Reetika Vazirani haunted her own writing in real time; she was no ghost at the typewriter, but held pen in living hand.

  A number of crazies came out of the woodwork. For example, there was the woman who, in a telephone call, claimed she was representing the British Sylvia Plath Society and wanted to “drop by for a little chat.” In another phone call, the leader of a Hindu prayer circle inquired about the possibility of holding its monthly meeting in our house. A doctoral candidate at a college in New York—again on the telephone—said that her thesis was on “creativity and suicide,” and asked if she could take photographs of our dining room and, in addition, might we provide photographs “from, you know, before. Just so I can have a mode of comparison.” A minor performance artist from Southern California sent an invitation to attend a performance of Medea in which she somehow played all the parts. And then there was the time I picked up the telephone and heard a woman say, “Hello, I’m a teacher and scholar from Pakistan. And I’m writing about what V. S. Naipaul called “forensic memoir.” I
immediately hung up. What could she possibly have wanted? A letter arrived asking us to vacate our house for an evening so that a group who held séances “specializing in artists” could carry out its mandate. The producer of a television show about paranormal activity found me having a cup of coffee in the café at Politics & Prose bookstore, and was all excited to set up a camera and lighting crew in the dining room of my house: “We’re the least invasive of any of the programs in our field.”

  More and more and more. To the point where I wondered, my goodness, what sort of world do we live in? And really, what did I know for sure? What did I really know? Perhaps only that this thing had been visited upon us, that my deepest sympathies lay with my wife and daughter, that next on my hierarchy of sympathetic response were friends and family who felt deeply for us. And I knew that violence of this nature had occurred through the millennia, in countless houses, in countless cities and villages, and unfortunately in our house, too. I also knew that no single fact could possibly provide any—my most despised word—closure. However, I hoped that the passage of time might allow for perspective.

  A year went by.

  I did not allow myself to expect life to contain, for quite some time to come, as much as I had previously felt. I believed that to expect otherwise would almost require a new category of optimism. The scaffolding, the framework, for joy had been rebuilt; it was rickety; I hadn’t dared to climb up on it yet. When I use the word joy here, I mean a reliable, compelling—and, yes, at times even transcendent—duet between a melancholy natural to my character and irony. It’s just my own definition, of course. So that when I sat up late into the night and thought about it, I realized that over the previous year, in the main when joy arrived, it was more a simulacrum. Almost but not quite recognizable as joy. I thought, Well, at least I comprehend the problem, the frustration, the longing to change this condition. As early as age nineteen, on my first visit to Point Reyes National Seashore, I discovered that watching shore birds was a trusted way of transforming a simulacrum of joy into, at least by my lights, authentic joy. And now I wanted joy back, pure and simple, because if you don’t have it, you start to experience what Keats called “a posthumous existence.” And I was terribly afraid of this.

  One of my favorite writers, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, asked, “What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?” I’ve found that melancholy can often be an intensifying element in humor, and conversely, humor can, as Ryunosuke suggests, make melancholy more useful in refining a philosophy of life.

  And so in early July of 2004 I traveled to California to look at shore birds. Jane stayed in Vermont, still shell-shocked but writing poems again—living her life. Emma was taking a zillion photographs, and she would soon have friends staying in the farmhouse while they rehearsed Hamlette (a female-centered and outlandishly comic version of Hamlet), to be performed in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, where, all summer, a new steeple and steeple bell were being installed in the Methodist church.

  From the San Francisco airport, I drove a rental car north on Route 1, past Muir Woods, stopped for lunch at Stinson Beach, and continued on to Olema. I checked into the Olema Inn and by two o’clock was at McClures Beach near Pierce Point Historic Ranch, all of which is part of the Point Reyes National Seashore.

  Throughout that first afternoon at McClures Beach, the heat was counterbalanced by sea breezes, whitecaps glinted in the sun, and the sea alternated between blue-grey and blue, depending on how the light presented it. In small flocks and individual presences, flying in, flying off, skittering along the beach, I saw sandpipers, dowitchers, surfbirds, willets, tattlers, turnstones, and plovers. At times they made for a riotous neighborhood of birds, and then, as if a crosswind had erased all life, the beach was suddenly bereft of them. I loved, as I have always loved, watching sanderlings hustle about and forage with their bills as if trying to stitch in place the wavering margin between tide and beach, a margin that soaks away with every wave. (I wondered once if this was the inspiration for invisible ink.) And high aloft over the cliffs, hawks and vultures were kiting the thermals. Late one afternoon I saw an enormous charcoal-hued, zeppelin-shaped cloud drop a curtain of rain, which was spectrally backlit by a glow from the farther sea. And soon a flock of pelicans flew straight out of that rain, as if it were an ancient form of bathing. The pelicans arrived and congregated on the beach, bellying out individual hammocks of sand, muttering, bickering, bill-clacking, and then all at once shut down all utterances, tucking into themselves for a communal nap.

  I spent the next couple of hours mucking about the tide pools, taking in the sun, not doing much at all, trying not to think, and then in the light of early dusk a western oystercatcher landed on a small rock island and emitted its characteristic piping whistle, kee-ap kee-ap wee-o. This bird is dusty black and has pale legs, a bright orange bill, and a rim of orange-red around its eyes. I watched this oystercatcher probe every nook and cranny, concentrate every use of its bill, poking, jabbing, laboring to pry up the most tenaciously adhesive of mollusks.

  Slowly the exhaustion of travel and the drowsiness from sun and sea air accumulated and I almost fell asleep standing up. Noting the condition of the tide, I walked back from the water thirty or so yards, lay down on the sand, and dozed off, only to be awoken in late dusk by the riotous noise of at least fifty seagulls. There were three different species of gulls, all drawn to a dead dolphin. The dolphin, now dull-skinned and splotched with sand, must have tumbled in while I was asleep.

  At their rapacious scavenging, the gulls were surprisingly unfazed by a rather tall woman dressed in a dark green rain slicker, blue jeans, and laceless hiking boots, her dark blond hair tied at the top of her head in a dreadlocked mop, standing not more than five feet away from the dolphin. She was working a tripod camera. Now and then as I watched through binoculars, I saw a gull feign a skirmish with the photographer, hovering in midair, cough-shrieking like a rusty well pump, yet the woman went on adjusting her lens, taking photographs of the dolphin’s carcass, jotting something in her notebook tied by a string to her belt.

  I watched this until most of the daylight was out over the sea and the cliffs threw shadows on the beach, and then I set out for the trail back up to the gravel parking lot. At the top of the rise, when I turned to look back, there was just enough light to see that many gulls were taloned to the dolphin, wildly flapping their wings as if trying to carry it away to a secret lair for the night. Their squalls and cries echoed up the beach as the photographer packed up her equipment and lit a cigarette.

  I drove back to the Olema Inn, seeing a bobcat scatter across the road into the tall, dry grass and weeds, and hawks perched on fence posts as the night came on fully. I had a mango salad at the inn’s restaurant, then sat in jeans, T-shirt, light sweater, and loafers on the side porch, drinking a glass of wine, watching swallows and the occasional bat zigzag and careen after insects. In the cooling night air the fragrance of a nearby stand of eucalyptus was deeply—and familiarly—stirring, and I felt gratified that the day had gone as it had. Then, at around eight-thirty, a rattletrap 1960s Volvo, with two hubcaps missing and a faulty muffler, pulled into the parking area, and when its driver crouched out I saw that it was the photographer. She carried her tripod camera and a leather satchel, her boots slung around her neck, and she was barefoot. When she stepped up to the porch I said, “You were with that dolphin, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, that was you,” she said. “Yeah, I noticed somebody up the beach. I was annoyed. I prefer to be out there alone. I’m usually out there alone.”

  “Join the club.”

  She reached out her hand for me to shake and said, “I’m Halley, last name’s spelled S-h-a-g-r-a-n—pronounced chagrin.”

  I laughed and introduced myself. “Does your last name explain why you’re drawn to sad sights like that dolphin?”

  “Wow, that’s pretty funny,” she said. “And pretty personal. But you know what? That dolphin was definitely not a sad sight fo
r me.”

  “How so?”

  “Because death happens in nature and I like to take pictures of it. The way I look at it, the beaches are always full of such news—natural-history news, I call it. The dolphin was like an obituary from the sea. There’s hundreds a day.”

  “Interesting how you put things.”

  “Interesting or not, that’s my thinking. Know what else? I don’t mind calling myself a nature photographer. I don’t mind if somebody buys a photograph of mine because they enjoy nature. That’s cool. Life for me has a spiritual affirmation and so does death. That was quite an earful, huh?”

  “I’d like to see some of your work.”

  “I only use black-and-white film. And you know what?—and I can’t verify this—I only dream in black and white, I’m pretty sure. My husband, Sonam, says that in a past life I was colorblind. He tends to say stuff like that. He’s a Buddhist. I mean a Tibetan Buddhist. I mean a born-and-raised-in-Tibet Buddhist.”

  “Did you meet in Tibet?”

  Halley sat on the bench beside me; an acrid whiff of what had to be the dolphin snapped in my nostrils, and when Halley noticed me noticing this, she said, “Yeah, well, I was just going up for a bath. But to answer your question, no, we didn’t meet in Tibet. But we got married there. No, I’d been teaching a introduction to photography class on the UC Berkeley campus. Sonam was late for a lecture he was giving in physiology, he’d got lost trying to find the lecture room, and he wandered in. I was in the darkroom, and one of my students sent him in to get directions from me, but I didn’t know where his lecture room was either. He had the wrong part of campus, I told him that much. But that’s how we first met. After that he came to the darkroom, like, twenty days in a row or something.”