LAST NIGHT WE BOTH depressed ourselves a little by renting, and watching, a forgettable movie, one we should have turned off after half an hour in favor of doing something else. A movie like this makes you feel you’re wasting your life watching it, and that’s what happened to us. And yet we watched anyway. Then it was over, and we both felt self-conscious about how we’d spent our evening. Jamie said, “Let’s not do that again; if it’s bad, let’s turn it off next time,” and I agreed with her, though we both knew no principle would guide us in the future. I went up to my garret and checked my e-mail—hoping, I confess, to hear from my agent, Ally Krantz—and then sat in an old club chair, napping. It was the kind of napping where you argue with yourself, for a long time, about getting up to go to bed. Images come in curious procession, punctuated by interludes of clarity, like rising to the surface after being underwater. At last I stood up. I keep a few artifacts and totems on my desk: a spoon one of my sons carved for me in a wood-shop class; a figurine of the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys; a fire-drill set—a charred cedar board and a carved yew-wood stick—that was once John William’s; and a postcard of E. B. White at his typewriter in a shed. These, for whatever reason, caught my late-night attention, and I was struck by how little I noticed them for months on end, despite all the time I spend in this room—these things that are there because they have a private meaning or because they’re meant to induce aesthetic pleasure, all of them only inches away but largely ignored.
I went to bed. But now it was hard to sleep—that’s the problem with late reveries in my club chair—so I thought about the past to pass the time. Around three in the morning, Jamie asked, out of the blue, though it didn’t entirely surprise me, “So what are we going to do with the money?” We talked about that for a long time without deciding. It got light, and after my morning routine—feeding the dog, brewing coffee, stretching a little, and staring out the window—I returned to my garret. At eight, Jamie turned on the water in the shower. I could hear her—even though we were on different floors—hawking spit in the stall and singing with parodic intent. We sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating toast. I thought Jamie looked good in her outfit—just a simple cotton V-neck shirt, short-sleeved, with a wrap skirt and sandals. She’s past fifty; even so, I think she moves through the world looking good to other people, too. Until recently, Jamie had a job appraising real estate, which she didn’t particularly like, but we needed the money. The boys were gone, but we still needed her paycheck. One thing: Jamie and I never argued about money. I’m frugal to a fault and so is she.
Our wedding, twenty-eight years ago, was an agnostic affair, held in a gazebo with our families present and a judge presiding, near formal specimen trees in the Washington Park Arboretum, just a few miles from where we live now. Sometimes, on walks, Jamie and I sit in this gazebo to get out of the rain, maybe looking at a small tree-handbook we carry, with its descriptions of leaves and needles, its pencil drawings and index of Latin names, or warming our hands in our pockets and reading the graffiti penned on the posts; or, at some point, I’ll mention the neuroma in my foot or Jamie the arthritis in her fingers, or, most likely, the two of us will add another segment to our dialogue on how our grown-up sons are faring. You would think that sitting sheltered from the rain in the gazebo where you were married would feel romantic, and it does, but the fact that it feels romantic no longer seems, to either of us, important. We leave that feeling in the background, so—for example—if you were to see us deliberating over jars of pasta sauce at our regular grocery store, the Trader Joe’s at Roosevelt Way and 45th, it wouldn’t occur to you that romance is part of our relationship, and in the same way, it wouldn’t occur to you if you saw us in that gazebo. You would just see a couple at midlife, identifying trees together or talking quietly. You would, I think, barely register our existence on your way to wherever you’re going, just as we hardly noticed other people when we were walking, thirty-two years ago, in the Dolomites.
3
GODDESS OF THE MOON
ON A SUNDAY this April, the Seattle Times ran a front-page feature, continued, densely, on two inside pages, about me and the hermit of the Hoh. It included a photo, lifted from the ’74 Roosevelt High School annual, in which I’m wearing a black bow tie and a white dinner jacket, a shag haircut, and a mustache, and another of me taken this April on the South Fork of the Hoh, sitting with one leg over the other and gesturing toward the water. I’m described as, among other things, the hermit’s only friend, and it was this, apparently, that prompted a call I got shortly afterward from a Cindy Saperstein.
I didn’t know what to make of her at first. The sentences emitting from the other end of the line were so pell-mell they put me off balance. Was I really John William’s friend? she asked. If so, she wanted to sit down with me, because years ago, she said, she’d been his “flame.”
I said John William had never mentioned any “flame.”
“Okay,” she said. “You’ve been getting weird phone calls since the newspaper thing.”
“No,” I said. “Well, one.”
“This isn’t a weird call. I went with him at Reed. My name’s Cindy Saperstein. Houghton then. I was his girlfriend.”
I considered hanging up. “Come on,” Cindy pleaded, “I went with him at Reed. Gnosticism, right? Always talking about the Gnostics? Did he go off with you constantly about the Gnostics?”
“Constantly.”
“So let’s meet.”
WE CONVERGED, three days later, on a Starbucks halfway between Seattle and Portland. Since I was unsure about traffic, I beat her there by fifteen minutes, an interval I partly spent watching drivers maneuver to park in an undersized lot, including Cindy in her unwashed Volvo station wagon with its barricading dog-screen and defiant, if moot, KERRY/EDWARDS bumper sticker. Why did I dismiss the woman who struggled out of this iconic vehicle with a large sisal handbag and a practical sunhat as not the person I was waiting for? The politics were apropos if I extrapolated forward from Reed in the mid-seventies, and the woman herself was of the right vintage, but it still seemed impossible that this gray-haired Democrat—who’d advised me to look for “a past-her-prime earth mother”—had once been John William’s “flame.”
It was 2 p.m., and Cindy wanted a midsized iced Mocha Frappuccino made with skim milk. I wanted one, too. I think we both enjoyed watching the barista because of the federal case this young woman with a tiny tarnished nose-ring made out of preparing our concoctions—Cindy and I shared middle-aged amusement and middle-aged forbearance, bonding, I thought, by virtue of a generational contrast. At our table, Cindy sipped through her straw, then removed her sunhat with a sweaty flourish. She told me that for years she’d had a landscaping business and still did occasional landscape design, but right now she was writing screenplays. She’d written one, in fact, that had recently been optioned, about an eighteenth-century explorer in Florida “taken in by natives.” Her husband was a CPA and blues pianist. Her college-senior son was working with an NYU chemistry professor on…Cindy didn’t understand it, but it had to do with nanobots. Her college-sophomore son was an exchange student “studying snowboarding” in New Zealand, and her high-school-sophomore daughter, in a humbling surprise of parenthood, was now at cheerleader camp in Idaho.
With this mention of her daughter, Cindy did something girlish—she reached back and laid her hair on her shoulder. When she turned her face to the side, I saw her as she might have been at Reed: as an ingénue painted by Vermeer, maybe with an earlobe poking out of her tresses. “To be frank,” she said, “I called you for a reason. The reason being that after seeing you in the paper I thought we should talk about a screenplay.”
“What?”
“Between the two of us,” she said, “we’ve got a story with juice.”
“No one’s going to make a film about a hermit.”
“Yes, they are,” said Cindy.
SHE WAS HARD to stop. And I’d driven for close to two hours. S
o I sat there while she told me how she’d met John William at a Reed dorm dance and how, in the semidarkness, she’d noticed him long before he asked her to the floor, because he was the type that attracted her—“the boy next door with a dark side.” They danced to “Long Ago and Far Away,” by James Taylor, which in blunt despondency asks, “Where do those golden rainbows end?” and “Why is this song so sad?” and which is so languid it left them, Cindy told me, with no alternative to the “slow dance” mode of the era. This meant dancing very little, or for that matter hardly moving while in one another’s clutches, but it was also, or could be, an intensely pleasant exchange of scents, pressures, hot breath, adjustments of hands, small turns of the head, and noses brushing hair, all of which she experienced while dancing with this handsome, clearly well-bred, but rough-around-the-edges guy who so far had no name and whom she couldn’t remember having seen on campus; but it was only early October of her freshman year, and she hadn’t met a lot of people yet; she had so far, mostly, done a lot of apologizing for being from Aurora, Illinois.
“Long Ago and Far Away” ended. They uncoupled, Cindy with reluctance. The guy she’d danced with didn’t say his name or ask for hers, but he did say, as he stepped back, “Marry me.”
“Okay,” answered Cindy. But she also felt that if this was irony her dance partner had an excellent poker face.
They went for a walk. A fall night, with all the silvery edges trees have on a fall night because of moonlight and dry air, all the little campus bushes looking lit and still, and (Cindy, at Starbucks, thinking screenplay) no dialogue. Cindy couldn’t tell if she was headed toward the college-library roof or going out for ice cream. She was aware that October moonlight showed her face to good effect; she was also aware that October moonlight was a romantic cliché associated with the heartland of America, from which she’d sprung. They walked without saying anything, leaving campus, and as their silence deepened she began to wonder, with burgeoning alarm, what it meant, this intense atmosphere of no words between people who’d just met. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“Please,” he answered. It sounded like pleading.
They were standing in front of a well-maintained Craftsman house where a golden retriever watched them from the porch. Or that’s the gist of it—what Cindy called “the ultimate statistically correct family domicile.” She remembered it because it was what she was looking at when John William kissed her. His eyes were shut, but hers were open. He was a tender kisser, interposing his lips between hers without insistence or pressure. When he came up for air—“Well, this is always an awkward moment, isn’t it, when you’ve just shared a kiss with a person for the first time and there’s the question next of what to do with your eyes. But most of the time you work that out, right? Kiss again, or act casual about it? John William, when he got done kissing, he turned around and split. Like that. The guy turned around and walked away.”
Cindy Houghton slid her hands into her jeans pockets and watched this strange boy retreat. “Hey,” she called. “What’s your name?”
At Starbucks: “He gives me all three names. Like I was asking for his middle name, too. I mean, this is what I’m talking about. He kissed me and told me his weird, scary name, and then he just walked away.”
HE WROTE HER a letter in an intense, slanted script, dutifully cursive but inelegant. “I found out your name,” it began. “I got your dorm room number.” That same day, when she emerged from her last class at three-twenty, there he was, falling into step beside her out of nowhere. “I wrote to you,” he said. “Did you get the letter I sent?” He was wearing hiking boots recently treated with a waterproofing wax and, despite the cold, he had no coat, just a gray flannel union shirt with its buttons open, its flaps revealing a V-shaped swatch of hairless chest. His sleeves were pulled to the elbows, and the cold emphasized the blood vessels in his forearms. She kept asking herself whom he looked like until she remembered a painting she’d seen in a Chicago museum of the death of Robespierre, which was mostly about Robespierre’s unbridled hair and blousy, unlaced chemise d’homme, and the fact that he’d shot himself ineptly in the jaw in a stab at suicide before his date with the guillotine. “Yes,” she said. “I got your letter.”
“You didn’t write back.”
“Not yet I didn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“I didn’t have time.”
John William put a hand to his forehead. “Please don’t say that,” he pleaded.
What? He was nimble and tense, an overanxious strider, but she wanted to keep up with him, because she felt his adoration, and to be adored was the point of her life, the state of things she’d yearned for dating boys in Aurora and still yearned for at the moment, as a college student on the West Coast mulling majoring in botany; now all of this intensity aimed in her direction made her feel a lot at once. “Your name means ‘woman of Kynthos,’” he’d written, “the mountain on Delos where Artemis and Apollo were born. Cynthia, another name for Artemis, goddess of the moon, of the wilderness, the hunt, wild animals, and fertility. A virgin goddess, armed with a bow, guardian of children, patron of women in childbirth…” The notes she’d gotten from other boys, in high school, had said things like “kegger on Fri. at Tommy’s” and “let’s do a doobee after 3rd.” So she held her books to her chest and made no effort to widen the space, which John William had made intimate, between their shoulders. (“Of course, back then one of the givens in life was that you were aware of feminism,” Cindy mentioned at Starbucks. “But I still wanted adoration.”)
They walked in an ellipse, in an intentional and hard-driving aimlessness, which for her was evidence of something she couldn’t discern; that they were hardly talking must imply something, too, but what? The trees were aflame, as in poetry about October—the sycamore maples in front of Psychology, and the European beeches on the walkway toward Art—and the grotesques staring down from the walls of the library didn’t look threatening or disturbing. Cindy was wearing a blue parka, unzipped; the tips of her ears felt hot pink with cold. The boy beside her, meanwhile, seemed top-heavy in the shoulders. His best feature was his goat-boy’s mane of hair, not washed recently and sexually evocative—as though in his potent urgency about everything there was no spare moment to brush it away: his hair formed a dark scrim across his eyes. Clearly, though, he was a blue-blood. Cindy could tell the boys from good families by the envelope of fundamental neatness that traveled with them, but she also, normally, found them boring in their narcissism. Maybe this is what this “John William” was, but in a new permutation, so advanced in his self-absorption he’d come out the other side, as if his adoration of her was self-absorption inverted. This light he shone on her was—maybe—as much about its source as about its object—like the moon, she was brightly lit by it but still devoid of her own atmosphere. “I don’t understand you,” she said to him.
“I don’t understand you, either.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Neither do I.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did you run off the other night?”
He sighed—a graphic heave from the solar plexus up—as if completely aghast.
They ended up making out while standing in the trees by an amphitheater. He was standoffish from the waist down, explicitly prudish about contact below the belt, and stopped the proceedings at frequent intervals to hug her in a platonic way or to look into her face from an intimate proximity. When she cupped his cheeks in her hands during one of these presbyopic stare-downs, he whispered, “Thank you.”
“See what I mean?” Cindy tapped the plastic lid of her Frappuccino. “Between your hermit stuff and my tale of bizarreness, we’ve got a screenplay.”
“The barista has a screenplay.”
“Not as good as ours.”
“So what exactly do you mean by bizarreness?”
“Listen,” said Cindy. “It’s pr
obably hard to believe this now, but when I was younger I had a super body, and guys would go from a first kiss to unzipping their pants in about half a second, so talk about weird and a big relief, the way John William treated me—I never felt urged, is the way I’d put it, to do something against my will, okay? And for a guy, that’s bizarreness.”
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