The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  So here I am in Mérida in the Yucatán for a few days to think things over, only an hour and forty minutes from Houston but a world away if you listen to the wood marimbas playing in the small park below my window. I never thought I liked marimbas but up close and personal through an open window they’re quite pleasant.

  The desk clerk told me that Fidel Castro stayed at this hotel as a student in Mérida. If Jack were with me he would have become hysterical and flown the coop but then Jack would never visit Mexico. He thinks Bush is “soft on immigration,” plus he lost money in the Mexican bond market in the eighties when the peso was devalued. I ordinarily ignore this sort of thing but we were visiting my parents at Rancho Mirage at the time and Jack stayed in a dark bedroom all day weeping in anger. My father talked him out of the room at dinnertime by describing some of his own precipitous losses with Studebaker and Nash. We still have a mint Nash Rambler in the garage of our family summer home in Harbor Springs.

  I’m sitting on the edge of the bed writing this and sweating profusely. I can’t freely turn on the air conditioner for family reasons. When I was in grade school my father’s best friend died of Legionnaires’ disease, a lung infirmity that was supposedly caught from a dirty air con ditioner and that was the end of air conditioners in my family though in truth I no longer object when I enter a room and the air conditioner is already on. It suddenly occurs to me that if I’m sentenced for murder in Texas I’m likely to be executed so I may as well turn on the air conditioner. So I do and flop back feeling the ceiling fans whir the cool air throughout the room, adding an insect buzz to the marimbas.

  What am I to do now? Stay put for the time being. The desk clerk also told me that Douglas Fairbanks used to stay here and not the junior Douglas Fairbanks. My mother said that one summer when I was a little girl my father had tossed her small framed photo of Errol Flynn off the rocks at Harbor Point and into the waters of Lake Michigan. The photo was signed and had been one of her own mother’s prized possessions. A neighbor boy had found it with his mask and flippers and the incident was the nearest my parents had ever come to divorce. Only last August my mother told me that she had never been unfaithful to my father but had had a rich and unfettered fantasy life. Who, I asked? Starting when she was young it was Randolph Scott and had moved on to Spencer Tracy, James Dean, Yul Brynner, Robert Duvall, and Robert De Niro. I held up my hand for her to stop. She was sixty-six last summer and my imagination needed strict controls in order not to visualize what I heard. You scarcely want to see your dear old mom in the arms of Brad Pitt in your mind’s eye.

  I suppose I broke the mold on family fidelity. I blame it on the arts. When Shirley and Frances and I moved into South Quad at the University of Michigan as freshmen in 1980 we all had a suppressed but very real fascination for the arts. In our families it was proper to be interested in the arts but not “too” interested, if you know what I mean. We were fairly rich girls from Republican roots, not rich rich like some, but pretty well-off. We’d known each other since we were kids and none of us wanted to go east to Wellesley or Smith or Vassar because we were from the Detroit area, went to prep school at Cranbrook, and our boyfriends, all jocks, were going to the University of Michigan. My mother was irked because she wanted me to go to Smith but Dad was a U. of M. alumnus and was happy about the decision. After fifty tailgate parties before football games I now loathe Ann Arbor except for Zingerman’s deli. So three girls loved the arts and were also timid feminists, restricting our most radical comments to our dorm room and, later, our sorority suite.

  I just noticed that I used “air conditioner” five times in one paragraph in defiance of what I learned in a class on essay writing. I suppose childhood fears really add up because when you’re eight years old and go to a funeral with your parents and see the casket of a man who got killed by an air conditioner you get fearful.

  I’m still timid. Here I am gossiping around the edge of what I did and what happened to me. I ruined my marriage, such as it was, and attempted to kill my lover. I could call the hotel room in Houston and ask, “Daryl, are you dead yet?” In the bathroom at dawn I ground up a dozen Elavils in a soap dish and put the powder in his morning coffeepot. Maybe he’ll just go into a permanent coma? I told Shirley and Frances when we met in Chicago last month that I was going to kill Daryl. They had no objections. He ruined all of us and we were wondering at the Drake how we could rebound. We lost the respect of our husbands and children. Frances and Shirley each had two kids while I just had Dolly. Dolly looks at me, shakes her head, gets teary, sighs, gives me a hug. Maybe if I wasn’t an only child and had had a brother I might have had a sense of the duplicity of men and how they treat their dicks as both a compass and a weapon of conquest. Way back in college Daryl had said in a coffee shop that screwing was part of the “class struggle.”

  How did I dare expect so much of life? And by contrast, how could I have acted so stupidly? I just took a walk to get a bite to eat and my eyes were stretched open enough to ache. It wasn’t that the people in the crowded streets were poor but did I live on the same earth that they did? When I walked around the zócalo, the park in the center of the city, far more of the people were smiling than you ever see in the U.S. I suppose this is a cliché of some sort. In a crowded market I forgot that torta was the word for sandwich and had a small bowl of fish soup at a seafood stall. It was utterly delicious though the teaspoon of habanero salsa I put in the soup made me stream with sweat. All of the people seemed at least part Mayan and were smaller than the Mexicans in Puerto Vallarta where I went on a winter trip with Shirley and Frances a few years ago.

  Of all things I thought of Joseph Conrad, who was one of my favorite writers when I was in high school. Conrad wasn’t an assignment. I found him among my dad’s books in the den. Conrad’s characters were always in places in the world where they didn’t really belong and felt a little naked and vulnerable. In the market I felt like a hard-shell egg within a hard-shell egg only the shell of the outside egg had cracked. My husband, Jack, took me to England on our honeymoon but England is scarcely a faraway place with a strange-sounding name.

  Of course resentment can set in at age fourteen when you understand that as a girl you can’t wander the world as a Conradian hero. And resentment of another kind settles on your soul when you have read Wuthering Heights three times in the ninth grade and it occurs that none of your male classmates are going to shape up as a possible Heathcliff though they’ll make passable Archies, Dagwoods, or Dick Tracys.

  On my way back to the hotel I stepped into the huge cathedral on the corner of the zocalo to cool off but the enormous contemporary crucifix scared me. Part of a restaurant called Los Balcones was an Internet café and I wondered if I dared contact Shirley and Frances but then I thought, For Christ’s sake I used my credit card for the Mérida ticket and Jack can daily monitor my credit cards. We never really talked about money except in terms of what Jack calls “fiscal responsibility.” Anyone with half a brain could figure my whereabouts or my guilt. There was a sudden image of Daryl as a vegetable in a hospital charity ward. How intensely I had loved him. It was a sickness. The trouble with love is that if it’s real, it’s uncontrollable. Why would someone want to drive this car with no brakes and no steering?

  I fell asleep for a few hours and woke up angry at Shirley. Yesterday on the phone she said, “Maybe he humiliated me into a human being.” I almost shrieked, “That’s phony Christian victim bullshit where you find something good in a terrible thing.” I certainly didn’t change her mind. She’s simply in love with the idea of penance. She really believes that her tragic affair with Daryl is making her a “better person.” When I told her that that wasn’t what he intended she said she didn’t care. Shirley has kept a daily journal since she was a girl and I can tell either on the phone or in an e-mail when she isn’t being spontaneous but is cribbing from what she thinks is a well-turned phrase in her diary. For instance in an e-mail she said, “Is there a more elemental version of ourse
lves, cooked down by grief?” She said she wept for a month which is Shirley’s usual hyperbole but then when looking at her sentence I realized that Shirley has always been tracking on some spiritual trail. At my very last tailgate party two years ago, before the University of Michigan-Michigan State game, Shirley’s husband, Hal, a Lansing car dealer, commented on the fine assortment of cheeses, salamis, and smoked salmon I had bought at Zingerman’s by saying, “You really love that Jew food?” Not wanting to dampen the party I whispered, “Hal, you’re an asshole,” and left it at that when I should have screamed it. Hal always brings his own overspicy chili which the men pretend to like but they never eat much of it. Why should it be a test of manhood to eat something that scorches your mouth? Anyway, both Frances and I think Shirley’s spirituality is mostly a reaction to the fact that her husband is an impossible lout. Frances has lived in California in the Bay Area for fifteen years so you’d think she would be the spiritual one from what one hears about that area.

  We were Kappa Kappa Gammas in Ann Arbor when we would have preferred to be the Three Musketeers. Our boyfriends tended to be Phi Delts. I took up with Jack in my junior year the afternoon my mother called to say my girlhood dog had died. It was a female mutt my dad brought home for my fifth birthday calling it Rover as a joke and the name stuck. I was already a bit shaky that afternoon and was smoking marijuana to calm myself down. My grades were withering. My mother was crying when she called and I thought that maybe Dad had died. No, it was Rover. I had dated Jack a few times but nothing serious. That evening after my dog died Jack took me for a long walk. I mistook the nature of his steadfastness which was really a lack of imagination just as my dad’s steadfastness has always been his borderline depression. My dad wanted to be a naval officer but instead came home to help his father run the family auto parts factory. Jack never wanted to be anything but Jack. He was born a trust officer. When I began to flip out a couple of years ago Jack assumed the posture of not noticing. Finally our daughter, Dolly, clued him in by telling him one evening when I was at the Detroit Symphony that I was having mental problems. She told me that he said, “Really?” but then confessed that he had noticed that I had lost touch with what he liked to call the “fundamental realities.” Naturally I sought professional help which only led me to ask, what credence could I give to the life I had led? And this sorrowful, probably banal questioning drew me carelessly to Daryl one icy, slushy March evening when he was doing a “literary arts” program at a local auditorium.

  Who is Daryl other than a fantastically inventive liar? I could exhaust myself with name-calling—pervert, con man, thief, sadist, wicked little boy, Svengali, Rasputin, what Buckminster Fuller called “a high-energy construct,” a cad, a gigolo, and, according to some critics, a supremely talented writer. I wouldn’t know about Buckminster Fuller but at eighteen I wanted to be an architect partly because Saarinen did so much work at my prep school, Cranbrook. The culture didn’t squash my ambition. I was simply enough poor at math and my disappointing aptitude tests recommended a career in journalism or humanities teaching.

  We met Daryl in a sophomore literature class, the only class Shirley, Frances, and I could get together that spring semester. I had seen him around campus and in town and thought him peculiar, almost a hippie type but not really because he dressed more like a day laborer, and sometimes wore those green shirts and trousers that janitors wore. He walked very fast so that sometimes the girls walking with him, always at least two, had to trot to keep up. He was deceptively slender because in warmer weather in a pullover shirt he was well muscled and his dark-complected face was even muscular looking. I once asked a homely girl I had seen walking with him who he was and she hissed that he was a “disgusting sexual predator.” As a freshman I was in love with a tennis player who turned out to be gay but at the time I was only idly curious about Daryl because he stood uniquely apart from the other young men.

  We were all in class together when Frances, by far the boldest of us, asked Daryl to have lunch with us after class. He looked startled and suspicious and said he didn’t have any money. “Our treat,” said Frances. He ate three whole rare beef sandwiches at the Pretzel Bell and ridiculed us for our salads, saying with an air of authority that our ovaries would wither. He said he was a full-scholarship student and had grown up in a small village in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan between the Straits and Manistique. He said his father was a handyman at a summer resort that catered to rich people. This turned out not to be true. I found out from another Upper Peninsula student that Daryl’s father was a small-time but fairly prosperous road contractor. Daryl could be counted on to fib gratuitously about everything. This was amusing rather than upsetting. We were anyway basically attracted to his brilliant talk and so was our professor. The class quickly became a dialogue between the professor and Daryl. After wolfing his three sandwiches that day Daryl coyly suggested that the four of us go to a motel and have “a wonderful clusterfuck.” Shirley and I were dumbfounded and grotesquely embarrassed. Frances also blushed but rose somewhat to the occasion by saying, “I doubt you could handle us,” to which Daryl replied, “Easy,” then yawned, got up, and left without saying thank you for the lunch. We sat there giggling nervously for quite a while and then Frances drew a small pin from her tiny sewing kit, the kind some hotels give out, which she kept in her purse, and we each made a prick in our arms mixing the blood together in a solemn vow that none of us would ever ever ever sleep with this monster. How young women love to create delusions!

  Around eleven in the evening I went down to Los Balcones, ate a delicious pork sandwich, and stared through the partition window wondering if Shirley and Frances had answered my afternoon e-mails. The sandwiches were made from a huge chunk of marinated pork twisting on an upright rotisserie. I struggled with the Spanish I had learned in two months in Madrid during my junior year at the university but the waiter’s English was nearly perfect. The question at hand was whether you preferred your pork slices crispy or soft or a mixture of both. I chose both while lost in thoughts of our preposterous truth session at the Drake last month. We certainly went through a box of Kleenex that afternoon.

  It turned out both of them had answered my e-mails. Shirley said that she’d pray for me in addition to stating that I should return to America and turn myself in to the authorities. She said that Jack had called her but she had only told him that I needed some space for myself. Did I want her to fly down to give me courage during my “dilemma”?

  I thought about that before I read Frances’s entry. “Bully for you,” she said, then added that she would fly down tomorrow from San Francisco to be with me. She was having their family lawyer make some discreet inquiries to find out whether Daryl was dead or not. At the very least she hoped he was “leaking from all of his orifices.”

  Frances’s husband, Sammy, is a real big shot in the computer business. Jack told me that Sammy took quite a hit three years ago but survived personally because he had diversified rather than pretending his company was the Godhead. Frances and her husband have an impressive home just south of San Francisco in Hillsborough, down the street from where Bing Crosby used to live. Back at school when Sammy visited Frances from MIT we thought he was a perfect nerd. He had nothing close to Jack’s social graces which I now see as absurdly meaningless. Frances and Sammy have an apartment at the Carlyle in New York City with an actual painting by Matisse on the wall. Not a major Matisse but nevertheless a Matisse. I never envied Frances because if anything she always has been less happy than me. Her mother was English and an alcoholic who used to scare me with her shrieking. Early on her father had been in the diplomatic corps but then became a big-deal lawyer in Detroit with an office in Washington, D.C. I liked her father very much and let him see me in the nude the morning after a pajama party because he asked nicely and I didn’t see any harm in it. He never tried to touch me and I, of course, never told Frances. When he asked while I was making toast in their kitchen I thought, Well he’s seen me in a biki
ni at their pool in the summer which is almost nudity. Anyway, I backed a few feet into the pantry, raised my nightdress over my head, and did a little twirl. He said, “Thank you,” and that was that. I was sixteen at the time and was puzzled that I felt so aroused by the incident rather than disgusted.

  Our full-blown psychodrama at the Drake likely fell short of complete honesty. Who said that there really is no past, only what we remember? Each of us painted our experiences with Daryl in a way that aroused the sympathies of the others. This of course was done as subtly as possible but had the disadvantage of us having known each other since we were children. Shirley nearly blew the cover for all of us by simply asking, “If it was so awful why did we continue so long?”

  None of us lasted more than a month, as if Daryl had had us prescheduled. I was first, Shirley second, and Frances third, in the Bay Area when Daryl was spending a month at Berkeley lecturing about writing. Shirley’s turn had come when Daryl had been at Michigan State in East Lansing for a spring term. After meeting Daryl at his local reading I presented scheduling difficulties. A friend at the Detroit Institute of Arts kindly enough appointed me to a research acquisition committee to give me an excuse to visit Daryl in New York City for three days a week for a month.