The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  Perhaps what was most unforgivable is that Daryl somehow “outed” us with our husbands. How could we have disregarded our youthful vow that none of us would make love to this monster? We had become an oddity on campus. Three sorority girls and their luncheon club with the leading counterculture beast of Ann Arbor. Actually Daryl was at odds with everyone on the left, and the right was simply beneath contempt. With ardent socialist types he affected a nonpolitical spirituality, and with the Buddhists he pretended a Native American ruthlessness. He said the world was round and it took effort to see all sides of it at once. This is not to say that he was aggressive because I can’t remember him ever raising his voice. He irritated the many amateur jocks because everyone wanted him on their touch-football team. He was an expert mimic, throwing a football unbelievably high in the air, then going out for his own pass and catching it behind his back. Jewish students were made uncomfortable by Daryl’s love for Hasidic philosophers. Certain black students I knew viewed Daryl as the ultimate con man and were amused. If only I had had the initial sense to take their attitude seriously. Even Arab students were not immune from his level-voiced contentiousness. Part of our luncheon-club routine was to discuss books that Daryl had strongly suggested and early on these included Idries Shah’s work on the Sufis, and the poets Rumi, Mirabai, Hafiz, and Ghalib.

  Our unvoiced fibs at the Drake when we were supposed to be “telling all” were nearly amusing. By May a few months after we had met Daryl at U. of M. I knew we had all had some physical contact with him because that’s what he told me. In my case it had been a wild ten-minute ride on the grass of a garden near the river, over behind the medical school. We necked a little with me resisting and then he went down on me, an original experience at the time. I felt like a high-speed kitchen blender. I cried on my solitary walk home because I had betrayed the vow I had taken with Shirley and Frances. Assuming that Daryl wasn’t lying, and I don’t think he was, both Shirley and Frances fell by the wayside vowwise. I can pinpoint Frances’s sin. It was the evening of my candlepass, the little ceremony at the sorority house to announce that I had been lavaliered by Jack (received his Phi Delt pin). Frances yawned and yawned then giggled. I glared at her suspecting she had smoked a joint up in the room. She would lean over or kneel before the toilet while taking a few drags thinking that if she kept flushing the toilet the swirling cold water would suck the smoke away. Anyway, she was teary at my anger and slipped out, and later down by the river Jack and I saw her and Daryl from a distance and we hid behind a bush. In Shirley’s case it was when she was in the infirmary with blood poisoning in her left hand from biting her nails. Daryl said she actually had a tube in her arm when he did it to her. He convinced her by pleading that he had to write a paper on Kierkegaard and couldn’t come up with a sentence until she temporarily relieved his lust for her. What a sucker. Incidentally she got over her nail biting by lighting candles before a little statue of a Buddhist saint, I forget which one.

  We gave a party for Daryl at a bar when as a junior he won a major Hopwood (a writing award) and he insulted us by leaving early with a freshman pledge to our sorority. She had come to the party with a Phi Delt football player, who swore he intended to beat the shit out of Daryl but he evidently lost the fight later that evening. We felt insulted, if not humiliated when Daryl left our party and snubbed him for a week which bothered him not one bit. When I tried to avoid him on a downtown street he laughed and I threw my sociology textbook at him. He caught the book and pitched it into the back of a passing pickup truck. I was simpleminded enough to sob.

  In the little park in front of the hotel a boy and girl in their mid-teens are having a lovers’ quarrel. Maybe I should go down the stairs and out the front door and tell the girl to run for it. I suspect more men murder women than vice versa. Frances is supposed to call at noon and tell me if I was successful. I bought a small bottle of Havana Club rum and am sipping at it though my father told me when I reached eighteen to never drink until five in the afternoon. When I was a child and talked out loud to an imaginary brother my father would become upset as if it were his fault that my mother’s medical difficulties prevented my having a sibling. My mother is a good person in the Episcopalian sense where she does no harm. She is puzzled and neutral. The library committee and World Hunger devour her time. She’s a poor cook, concentrating on menu planning rather than the food itself. Dad told me once that she was a lovely piano vaguely out of tune. During his three major depressions while I was growing up and before I left for the university he would stay in his bedroom or study—there was a door between—and only see me. I’d bring him a tray of food and some days he would eat, and some days not. One spring I drove north with him in May to our cottage, really a summer house, a full month before we normally opened the place. It was cold and windy for three days but on the fourth the wind turned to the south and it began to warm up. I could see that my dad’s spirits had been lifting because he rejected the old woman my mother had sent out to us to cook and instead we cooked hamburgers and hot dogs and steaks in the fireplace. On this first warm morning after I did my school makeup work we drove north toward Cross Village and picked morel mushrooms in the woods which were loud with birds. A farmer caught us and said we were trespassing but then he and my father recognized each other from when they were boys. We went to the farmer’s ramshackle house and his wife fried the mushrooms in butter and we had them on toast. They were delicious. I think I was thirteen at the time. My left foot hurt from ballet lessons. After we ate the mushrooms we went out in the barnyard and while my dad and the farmer whose name was Fred were studying an old tractor I currycombed the dead winter hair out of two draft horses. The horses liked it so much their skins shimmied. Of all animals horses smell the best. When we got back to the cottage my dad skipped his nap and we took the Lightning, a small sailboat, out of the old boathouse. The bay water was cold and we dressed warmly but the air really heated up as the afternoon passed. I rarely ever heard my father swear but far out on the bay with the Lightning cutting through a short chop he said, “Fuck Detroit” in a flat voice. He had been depressed since March and it was wonderful to see him alive again. Back at the cottage he had his five o’clock drink and cooked us a steak which we ate out on the porch. He poured me a very small glass of red wine. I fell asleep before dark on the sofa before the fireplace and when I awoke around midnight and went to my room I was sure I heard him crying in his room down the hall. This wasn’t upsetting because mother had said that by the time he begins his crying jags she’s sure he won’t commit suicide. I almost forgot that when we brought the Lightning back to the boathouse we saw a sturgeon glide by. Way back when, Lake Michigan was full of sturgeon but this was the first one I had seen. It was about twelve feet long and in full command of its element when it sensed us, moving quickly out over the drop-off toward deeper water.

  I turned the air-conditioning off an hour or so ago and I sip the rum from dreaded Castro’s Cuba. Jack is probably polishing his Lexus in our absurdly heated garage which he does when he’s disturbed. The desk clerk sent a message up with a cleaning lady and when I gave her five dollars she refused to take it until I insisted. It was from Frances saying that she and Shirley would be there by eight that evening. That was that with no mention if Daryl was dead or alive. My thoughts turned back to murder and also Joseph Conrad, the latter probably because the room was overwarm and I could hear guitar and accordion music down in the street, certainly not happy music but a melody and voice so ineffably melancholy that my tears formed. I tried to think rationally to the effect that if Daryl was dead the police surely would have arrived by now. I meant to kill him. My wise counselor or analyst, whatever, tried to tell me that I was a sucker for Daryl because of my father and my need to help men. I denied this because naturally you would try to help a father you loved so much. Daryl was in some sort of netherworld where love and sex get twisted up together and can’t be separated. My husband was so sexually boring I had nowhere else to turn. I know
this sounds lame but it’s true. I simply and desperately wanted romance even well after it became abusive. What could this have to do with helping my father? At the summer house that May I’d cook him “egg in a hole” for breakfast, my only recipe other than instant macaroni and cheese from a box. With egg in a hole you make a piece of toast and cut a round hold in the middle. You put lots of butter and the toast in a saucepan and break an egg into the hole. My dad pretended this was wonderful though he doused it with Tabasco. He wasn’t much for advice but during my sixteenth summer when I was having a terrible slump he told me that I shouldn’t squeeze the life out of myself following someone else’s principles of right conduct. I’ve always wondered if he had had an intuition about the nature of what had gone wrong in my life that July when I had lost my virginity to a boy I scarcely knew at a beer party. We all went nude swimming at a gravel pit and he had slipped in his small penis during a water fight when we were half out of the water. I almost screeched but didn’t want to draw attention and it was over in seconds. This was as far as you could get from the Heathcliff I had dreamed about. When Shirley and Frances came up for a visit in August they weren’t impressed one way or another. Shirley had done it with a cousin when they were stoned on marijuana and quaaludes and Frances had lost her virginity on a trip to D.C. at a sex party organized by the sons and daughters of diplomats. “It’s just something you get out of the way,” Frances laughed.

  The thought of my four trips to New York City to see Daryl makes me shiver despite the room’s heat. I take a bigger slug of rum so that I cough and some of the rum comes up in my nose. You would think we would have figured out love and sex by this point. At the university the graduate student who taught biology was a perfect number ten nerd who would snicker and chortle over the reproduction of species as if he were revealing a dirty little secret hidden in flowers and toads.

  On the first trip Daryl didn’t meet me at La Guardia with flowers as he said he would. Instead there was a driver holding up a name card who I had to pay a hundred dollars to when we reached my hotel, a lovely little establishment on Irving Place only a few blocks from Daryl’s apartment where I couldn’t stay because of Daryl’s erratic work habits, or so he said. At the hotel there was a message that I should take a cab to an apartment on the Upper West Side which I did only to discover that Daryl was no longer there but a beautiful woman at the door with lots of voices behind her gave me an address on the Lower East Side. Daryl wouldn’t carry a cellular for the obvious reasons that he didn’t want anyone keeping track of him. It was a rainy April evening and I had trouble catching a cab but finally made it to a shabby apartment on the Lower East Side where Daryl was talking to three younger poets who appeared to be his disciples. He barely said hello until he finished a long speech on what was wrong with the poetry of James Merrill (everything) and then he took me into the junky bathroom and bent me over the sink and quickly made love to me. By then I was in tears and very hungry. I drank a big glass of red jug wine and fell asleep on the couch and when I awoke Daryl had slid up my skirt to show the young poets how nice my legs were from so many years of ballet lessons. I stomped out and walked ten blocks back to the hotel in the rain stopping for a fifteen-dollar hamburger that wasn’t very good. I made reservations to leave the next morning and fell asleep in my damp clothes. Daryl arrived in the middle of the night quite drunk, teased me about being “bourgeois,” and fell asleep. At first light I forgot my anger and we made love beautifully, the best in my whole life in fact.

  The following trips went downhill from there. How could a man who had studied all that was great in literature be such a shithead? But maybe “downhill” isn’t an accurate description. It was more like a shuddering elevator, an elevator that went willy-nilly up and down with no one really at the controls. Daryl liked to think he lived for the “instant.” He felt that as a writer it was his privilege to edit the world. No one as willing as me has the right to portray themselves as a victim. Nowadays people seem to want to be rewarded for being troubled, for falling in a hole that they actually jumped into.

  The disastrous night and wonderful early morning were followed by a puzzling day. We went over to Daryl’s very small, spare apartment that was nearly elegant. It was the maid’s quarters on the fourth floor in a very old brown-stone just off Gramercy Park. A large window looked down at a miniature garden in back. It was really only a room and a half but seemed spacious with a single wall of books, a low-slung cot, almost a pallet that served as a bed, a big gorgeous leather couch, a CD player, a single four-place table near the stove and fridge with books neatly packed at the back, and a large desk in the corner. The floor was polished wood and the entire place was so unexpectedly immaculate that I drew my breath. The only art on the walls were Hokusai reproductions. Frankly the place didn’t look lived in but then Daryl said that his life tended to be messy so that he kept his living quarters orderly. He never allowed “sleepovers.” He started to make us omelets and when I went to the toilet I was jarred to see a large nude photo of myself on the inside of the bathroom door that he must have taken while I was asleep at the Kingsley Inn after his Bloomfield Hills reading. My first impulse was to tear the photo off the door but I felt too indecisive and when I came out of the bathroom he said, “Don’t you love your photo?” I said, “No” and then he did one of his peculiar little lectures on how women never totally approve of their bodies. I was irked by the way he could flip the cheese omelets without using a spatula. Above his desk there was a family photo with Mom and Dad, a sister, and a brother, with Daryl standing behind them a full head taller and not looking very much like the others.

  “I was adopted,” he said and for once he seemed to be telling the truth. The maid just brought up another message, a fax from my husband, Jack, saying among other blather that he would stand behind me in my “terrible troubles.” Everyone seemed to know the extent of my problems except me! Dolly was having a good time in Vail. She and three other girls were sleeping in a room with bunk beds and under “strict supervision.” The last thing on the fax, almost an afterthought, was the item that I was supposed to call my father. This made me break into tears because he had been especially depressed in the late winter, his usual time. My parents come from an offshoot of the class that thinks it’s nearly criminal to seek mental help. I took another swig of rum and called his private ring-through number in the den. I squeaked out a “hello” to answer his own.

  “Martha, you’re in a pickle.”

  “Is he dead?” My tears were flowing.

  “Not really. Sort of a coma from which he will emerge, deservedly or not.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I talked to Shirley and Frances. Don’t you know anything about men?”

  “This one is different from others.”

  “Perhaps. Anyway you luckily left a pill on the bathroom counter so they could figure out treatment. You’ll have to go back to Houston. I have a lawyer for you. Jack has one too but I suspect mine is better. A big deal, you know. Your husband is acting like a perfect ninny.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Beginning a half dozen years ago my father had conceived a dislike for my husband more intensely focused than my own. He thought Jack a “perfect product of our culture” and I had never pinned him down for what he exactly meant though the clue was likely his contempt for what he called “situational ethics.” He was an antique kind of Teddy Roosevelt-Robert Taft Republican. I mean he loathed Lyndon Johnson but he also passionately disliked Bush Junior and thought of Reagan as a man of limited intelligence.

  “Well, I think we can bail you out of this but it won’t be overnight. It’s going to be expensive but we’re old and it’s finally your money we’ll be spending on this. I trust you’ve come to your senses enough to realize that murder wasn’t a good idea.”

  Of course I began to sob but managed an “I love you” before I put down the phone. Here I was in the Yucatán in Mexico at age forty-two calling my dad as if I were fourteen, or yo
unger yet. Everything in me rose and converged and wondered if anyone was truly designed for the life I had lived. There were so many layers of artificial privilege that looking out the window I had the vantage point of another universe. I was flooded with the fears and sensations I had had as a child at a picnic at the fancy lodge of a friend of my father’s when I had wandered off into the forest in the wrong direction thinking I was going to find a lake. I had seen some kids in wet bathing suits and wanted to go swimming. I walked and walked and saw a garter snake and a deer. I knew I was lost and walked faster. I was used to well-kept yards not deep forests. I think I was seven at the time. My pink dress was torn. I sat on a stump near a clearing and cried but then stopped crying because even at that age I figured crying wasn’t going to do me any good. After a while I could hear a motorboat off in the woods and I walked toward the sound until I came into the back lawn of a cottage where a woman was hanging wet bathing suits on a clothesline. She greeted me and sensed something was wrong. I gave her the name of my father’s friend and she said, “Oh my God” and took me into her cottage and made a phone call. “She’s here,” she said. I had somehow arrived at a different lake. I drank two big glasses of lemonade and we sat on a screened porch where I petted an old Labrador dog that stunk a little. The woman said that the dog spent all of her time hunting frogs in a swamp out back. Soon my father arrived with the sheriff in his squad car. The sheriff told me I had walked a long ways.

  I sipped the last of Castro’s rum feeling the heat of it prickle my scalp. I was supposed to call Jack but refused. I didn’t want to see him anymore. Period. I began to doze but before full sleep my mind made the silly analogy that Daryl was like the forest and I was a yard kid. Whatever he was he was amoral as a tree. There was a feeling that I was breaking open and couldn’t be put back together the same way. I didn’t want to be put back the same way. Maybe women’s prison would be good for me. My mother always insisted that everything awful had a silver lining. I had spent the day falling apart and now I looked idly around the room for the silver lining. Maybe I was dumber than I thought. What did the extreme sexual excitement with Daryl mean other than extreme sexual excitement? On the last morning of my last trip to New York Daryl was supposed to meet me for breakfast before I went to La Guardia but he didn’t show up. I know that the young man at the desk understood the mess I was in with Daryl. Out on the street trying to flag a cab in the rain I was sure I saw Daryl and Frances pass in a chauffeured town car. Was this possible? Of course. I never asked her but it was certainly possible. I threw the empty pint rum bottle up toward the ceiling fan which knocked it into a far corner where it rattled against the baseboard. I heard that at some university, I forget which, they’ll put you to sleep for ninety days and you wake up recovered from whatever. When I asked Daryl why he didn’t have a real bed rather than the uncomfortable pallet he said that he never indulged in what people called a “night’s sleep.” He just catnapped for a couple of hours at the most if he had too much to drink. He knew that if he slept like a normal person he would wake up and find he had lost what he called his balance. Besides when he was a boy his real mother had died of cancer. She was a Christian Scientist and wouldn’t take medications so she often screamed all night in the next room and after she died and he moved in with his new family he had decided against sleep. I couldn’t decide if this was another of his inventions though that first night when he showed up drunkenly at the hotel one of his eyes was partly open when he slept. I am sweating so much I’m wetting the bed but I don’t want to get up to turn on the air conditioner. I can’t figure out if it’s Friday everywhere. I know that Daryl would like this place even though Conrad was too stodgy for his taste. The marimbas have begun again and I’m lucky because their music makes me see moving water, a small river near Petoskey where my dad used to trout-fish and I’d sit on the bank and read books and listen to birds and passing water.