But within a year after that first summer at Chocorua, where Caroline had shown me the fire, I also knew there was no such thing as a bad row. It opened up the world in such powerful and quotidian ways that the promise of it, whether in February or August, gave us a calendar by which to mark our passion. From my first full season on the water, Caroline indulged my fervor with fond recognition of what she had been through years before. If the water was perfect—glassy and still—we would drop anything (dentist appointments, dinner obligations) to get on the river. I often went out in early evening, when the wildlife had settled and the shoreline had gone from harsh brightness to Monet’s gloaming, and then I would row back to the dock in golden light, the other scullers moving like fireflies across the water.
My stubbornness and upper-body strength compensated for my weak leg, and within a couple of seasons I had managed a passable stroke. I got stronger, faster, exhilarated on a daily basis. I went out in wind gusts and rain and came back spent and calm. Caroline had warned me that my entire relationship to the river would change, and to be careful driving—with the Charles River winding alongside Memorial Drive, it was easy to forget about oncoming traffic if you were rubbernecking the condition of the water. “The river will become a character in your life,” Caroline told me. “You’ll be amazed how much influence it will have on your day.”
By autumn, I had mapped out an entire country of flora and fauna, much of it invisible from land. I began to set my internal clock of miles logged by the landmarks I encountered. There was the man who played bagpipes each morning on a bend in the river—“The Halls of Montezuma” and, if I was lucky, “Amazing Grace”—and the muskrat a quarter mile upstream, appearing with such reliability that I could believe it was for my benefit. (There was also, less decorous, the exhibitionist on the wooded end of the river who flashed women rowers, about whom Caroline had warned me.) Most of all there was the arc and geography of the river and my place upon it. By September the goslings of spring would be learning to dive on their own; the marshes had turned from green to golden rose. All of it offered a palette in time and space where beauty was anchored to change.
I usually saw Caroline on her way upriver: the blond ponytail, the back of a dancer, a stroke as fluid as it was exact. (She never saw me until I called out to her, and even then she had to squint. The glasses she needed and refused to wear never left the glove box of her car.) Some days we would meet on a wide stretch by the finish line of the Head of the Charles. The moment she squared her blades and stopped, Caroline checked her watch, sometimes surreptitiously; even on the gentlest of rows, she was gauging her time. Then she would watch my stroke and give me a drill to occupy me for a few days. “Use your abs for the recovery,” she would say. “Stop checking behind you; you’re clear. Use your thumbs before you feather!” I thrilled to the language as well as the instruction.
In the summer of 2000, when I was forty-nine and Caroline was about to turn forty-one, we decided that we had one last chance to realize a dream: to row in a double in our age division in the Head of the Charles. We were mistaken about the age stipulation, which accepts any pairing with an age average over forty, but the fantasy stuck, and it gave us a mission for the season. It was the sort of goal we both loved, one that we could discuss endlessly while incorporating its training demands into our daily routines. Because we both fell into the under-130-pound weight division, we decided that we would bill ourselves as the Literary Lightweights—good for a few laughs on the river, we thought, and maybe even a corporate sponsor or two. Morelli, who had long wanted Caroline to show her stuff in a race, had T-shirts made for us with a tiny oarsman on the breast; he promised to hang off the bridges and photograph us during training sessions. As the more accomplished rower, Caroline would steer while I rowed stroke, which meant that she would have to slow her pace to mine.
This handicap was of no consequence to her and mattered greatly to me. I added stomach crunches and leg lifts to my regimen, and started taking my pulse after sprints on the water. I plied Caroline with progress reports: stroke rate, heart rate, technical or psychic breakthroughs. She endured my single-mindedness and placated me when she could. “I’m afraid I’ll fail you,” I said one day, with great seriousness; my German shepherd spirit at the ready, I had already turned a lark into a challenge of enormous weight.
“I will only do this with you if it can be fun,” she told me, and my antennae went up. “Fun” was a nebulous concept for both of us; her therapist was always trying to impose it on her. Fun was far more difficult to get a handle on than zeal. But I listened to her that day and tried to bank my fires, and eventually my training rituals became an end unto themselves.
We missed the entrance for our division that year, which for first-timers is decided by lottery. I think we were both relieved, for two reasons. One was that we had started training late in the season and weren’t ready to race. The other, more revealing reason was that Caroline and I were each so goal-oriented—she once told me that “mastery” was her favorite feeling—that we wanted the next season, and the next, to have an occasion to set our hopes and focus toward. Like most odysseys, ours on the Charles was more about the journey than the finish line. The metaphor of rowing may have been what we loved the most: the anticipation, the muscles spent and miles logged, the September harvest moon. Because we both possessed that single trait that makes a lifelong rower—endurance—we declared that we would row the Head together in our seventies, when the field had thinned sufficiently to give us a fighting chance. The fantasy would fuel us for two more winters.
After the 2000 regatta had come and gone, in late October, we took out the double to see how we might have measured up. It was a fiasco from the start: The boat had been rigged for giants, which meant that we were half prostrate during a full stroke; we didn’t realize this mechanical mishap until we were too far out on the water to make adjustments. The wind picked up, accompanied by haphazard gusts that made the river a sea of chop. Then the rain started—a cold autumn rain that pelted us from behind and threatened our nerves as well as our grip on the oars. Caroline responded to these horrid conditions by rowing harder. My stroke grew ragged and then uneven, until she finally told me to stop rowing altogether; if my rhythm was too far off, she would be battling against me. Frustrated by my own performance, I was in awe of hers: The worse the rain and the stronger the current, the steadier she became. We rowed the entire course, cheering as we crossed a deserted finish line. We were soaked from rain and waves, elated from laughter and exertion. I lay back in the boat and let Brutita row us home.
8.
THAT DECEMBER, A BLIZZARD STRANDED ME FOR days in Texas, where I had gone to see my family for the holidays. I finally managed to get on a flight that was rerouted through Chicago to Massachusetts. Caroline, in touch by phone during the ordeal, had taken Clementine to my apartment an hour before my flight was scheduled to arrive in Boston. At the end of a marathon travel day, I sank into the back of a cab at Logan Airport, wanting nothing more than to be in my own home, wanting my couch and the feel of Clementine’s ruff and the sound of Caroline’s voice on the phone. “Hostage to attachment,” I remember thinking, the words coming out of nowhere. Leaving town was what told me, reminded me, how much I relied on these two creatures to give purchase to the emotional ground of my life. If by now this realization was more consoling than unnerving, it was still a radical departure from my norm. However skittish Caroline could be, I may have been worse—more stubborn, more reflexively prideful—when the real bruisers of life showed up. In crisis, I circled my wagons, more afraid of being disappointed by someone than of going it alone.
For reasons that probably have to do with temperament and heritage both, I had spent a lifetime cultivating a little too much independence. Absurd or commendable, a lot of this behavior was unnecessarily severe. I’d hitchhiked long distances alone in my twenties; for years I’d swum the Wellfleet ponds after Labor Day, when they were deserted, until an early autumn thunde
rstorm convinced me this was a bad idea. Such feats, I privately held, were heroic in correlation to the amount of suffering invoked. Even after I stopped drinking, I never wanted my solitude to limit my range, so I signed up for work assignments that took me to Wyoming or London or anywhere I hadn’t been—gritting my teeth at the difficulty of such pursuits, plowing ahead because I thought I should be willing to bear the pain and isolation in order to glean the adventure.
But as much as I complained about my solitude, I also required it. I put a high price on my freedom from obligation, of having to report to no one. My sister, contentedly married a thousand miles away, laughed whenever I expressed the fantasy of holding out to find the right man to marry. “I don’t know, Caldwell,” she would say, resorting to our old adolescent habit of using surnames for each other. “I don’t think you could do it. You’d need a pretty long leash.”
The truth was that I had always fled. The men I didn’t marry; the relationships I had walked away from or only halfheartedly engaged in—there were always well-lit exits, according to building code, in every edifice I helped create. “Let’s face it,” a male friend, single and in his forties, said to me one day about our unpartnered status. “Neither one of us got here without a lot of fancy footwork.” I laughed at the time, but I was unsettled by how astute the comment was, and more obvious to him than to me.
AFTER THE CAB HAD dropped me at my apartment that winter night, I hugged the dog and called Caroline’s answering machine, to let her know I had made it. It was after eight p.m. and I didn’t really expect to talk with her. “I’m home, I’m all right,” I said. “Don’t bother picking up. I’m heading to the store—I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Twenty minutes later, I was loading groceries into my old Volvo when an out-of-control driver came veering through the parking lot at high speed and plowed into the back of my car. It happened so fast that I later remembered only a blur of white movement, then flying through the air. The Volvo had taken a bullet for me: The impact of one car into another had sent me flying like a billiard ball. When I came to, I was on my hands and knees on the pavement, yards away from point of impact; I had blood spewing from my chin and I was cursing. A group of people were standing around me. Somebody called 911; another disembodied voice claimed to recognize me, and gathered what was left of the spilled groceries to take to my house. When the EMTs arrived and strapped me to a backboard, I started arguing with them about cutting off my jeans and Lucchese boots. By the time I got to the hospital, I was giddy with adrenaline and telling jokes: that false pride of the trenches.
I was on the backboard for an hour waiting for an X-ray; by the time they released me, it was eleven p.m. My injuries were not serious—stitches in my chin, sprains and contusions but no broken bones—but I hollered in pain when I tried to put weight on my leg. Overwhelmed by more dire emergencies, the hospital staff gave me a cane and called me a cab. In the three hours I had been there, never once did it occur to me, with a phone four feet away from where I lay, to call Caroline or anyone else for help.
Or I should say that when it did occur to me, I dismissed it with the defensive sangfroid of crisis. It was Sunday night; I knew Morelli would be at Caroline’s, spending the night. I didn’t want to wake them, and I knew if I called they would feel duty-bound to come to the hospital. Pleased by my self-reliance, I half stumbled, half crawled up the stairs to my apartment.
But when I got inside, when I was in my living room at midnight, with Clementine nosing my bloodstained jeans, I broke down. I had phoned my parents back in Texas, who were expecting word that my plane had arrived safely, and lied through my teeth. They were in their eighties, my dad was in the first stage of Alzheimer’s, and I saw no need to alarm them. Then all my derring-do collapsed and I dialed Caroline’s number. My voice broke when she answered. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” I kept saying, an insistent preface to the story so I wouldn’t scare her. We stayed on the phone until she had convinced me to find something to eat and get into bed.
My car, a ten-year-old Volvo, had been totaled. The next day, Caroline came to get me and we drove back to the store parking lot; she went inside the market to grab some essentials for me while I tried to start the car and get the registration. Ten minutes later, she came out to find me standing, glazed-eyed, near the place where I’d landed; there was a pool of dried blood on the asphalt. On the drive home she was unnervingly quiet, and finally she blurted out the reason. “I keep thinking that if I had just picked up the phone when you first called,” she said, “this never would have happened. Three minutes later, and you’d have been out of the path of that car.”
I knew this inner dialogue of self-blame; it was treacherous and unwinnable. Caroline was worried not just that she’d failed to intervene with the stupid calamities of fate, but that she was somehow responsible—that her isolationist tendencies had put me in harm’s way. This was the sort of mind-set we could both engage in, and so I postulated the opposite: If she had picked up, I insisted, I might well have been just walking out of the store, and in the car’s direct line of fire.
For all the gritty education this incident provided, its one indelible moment, there long after the bruises were healed and the car replaced, was the one I had told Caroline about that afternoon: the thought that went through my mind when I was midair. The world appears with ferocious technicolor during crisis, and a decade later, I remember the visual arc of my body being airborne, my sight line about two feet higher than normal. But what I remember most was the territorial assault I felt, the indignation, while I was sailing through space. How dare you, the body and mind felt in furious accord. I’m in the middle of a life here. I was outraged because I had been working on this story line for years, and I knew it was not yet finished.
AFTER I HAD LIVED IN THE EAST FOR A DECADE, long enough to winnow the realities from the dreams, I was driving down Brattle Street one winter night at the start of a storm, when the snow was surfing the currents of a soft wind, and I had the dissonant thought that I could grow old here—something I had never thought about anywhere before, and certainly not during a New England winter. But Cambridge had reached out to me from the beginning. I loved the ornery brick-lined sidewalks and self-contained serenity that the town projected: all that formidable history bumping into pear blossoms and street musicians.
I had danced around the idea of owning property for years, usually as an alternate reality to wherever I was. I fantasized about a little piece of land in Truro, on the then desolate end of Cape Cod. I thought about a small house in Austin where I could spend winters, or a farmhouse outside the city with room for a couple of dogs. As the search had grown more realistic, I began looking at houses all over Greater Boston, exhausting myself with possibilities or mooning over properties I couldn’t afford. I was like a wolf circling its parameters, looking everywhere but the epicenter of my life.
The false starts probably mirrored my tendency toward flight and longing. Leave Texas, then miss it forever. Love your family from two thousand miles away. Refuse to marry, then spend your life complaining that you should have. The ingrained trait that my mother had called brooding had a free run when it came to where I imagined I belonged. I could explore alternate universes to my heart’s content within the world of geographical could-have-beens, where the endings were always kinder and the real estate cheaper. “I should have stayed in the Panhandle, and I’d be happily married to some rancher and have five or six kids,” I once announced to my therapist, who typically did not laugh out loud at such pronouncements. “I think the operative word here is ‘happily,’” he said, always ready to scorch an illusion when he could. As a follow-up joke he sent me a map of the actual town of Happy, Texas, a little place of about seven hundred people south of Amarillo. I kept the map of Happy on my study wall for years, to remind me of the Elysian Fields we all envision.
“SCRATCH A FANTASY and you’ll find a nightmare.” This was one of Caroline’s favorite sayings, spoken originally
in regard to a mutual friend, a woman who had chased a dream life abroad and wound up trapped and unhappy. Then the saying became code for all those seemingly perfect lives being lived someplace else, with better jobs or partners or inner states. Whenever I would say (in winter or traffic, or on a bad day), “Why do we live here?” Caroline would respond, instantly, “Fresh Pond and Starbucks.” Starbucks wasn’t yet on every corner in America, but Caroline was shorthanding for the ineffable whole: the surly poet on the corner, or the river at dusk, or the store with the butcher who knew us by name. We lived here for each other, and for everyone else we loved within twenty miles, and for all the good reasons people live where they live. They need the view of a wheat field or an ocean; they need the smell of a thunderstorm or the sound of a city. Or they need to leave, so that they can invent what they need someplace else.
According to our mutually mythic pasts, I was the exile and Caroline the child who had stayed. I’d fled the bleak farm and ranchlands of the Panhandle, made it to Austin five hundred miles south, and lived in San Francisco for a couple of years before finally heading for the East. Caroline had grown up in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Radcliffe quad; when she left for college, she went to Brown University in Providence, an hour away. She came back to Cambridge four years later and had strayed only so far as a couple of neighborhoods from her childhood home. Her familiar was my exotic—her Cambridge was my Amarillo—and it seemed part of the price of urbanity, like growing up in Greenwich Village, that it was too cool a hometown to flee. The year after her parents’ deaths, Caroline had bought an attached Victorian house in the middle of Cambridge, with wide pine floors and an exposed brick chimney and ten-foot ceilings. More than a century old, the place was all angles and elegance, with comfortable mission furniture and Lucille’s toys within carefully organized reach. I lived a few miles away, in a light-filled second-floor apartment I had rented for a decade. Much of the ambivalence I felt about setting down roots was softened by the sense of shelter I knew Caroline’s house provided her. When pragmatism finally won out over inertia, I began the Sunday open house slog through scores of property listings—the standard heart-of-darkness journey that accompanies house hunting. And Caroline, intrepid soldier, went along for the entire march.
Let's Take the Long Way Home Page 8
