The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  “Fever,” from the collection Cathedral, was my father’s story almost exactly: Carlyle is abandoned by his perfidious wife, Eileen, and must care for two small children without her; he struggles for competent babysitting, for an eclipsing of his sorrow, and along the way earns triumphs too tiny to make much difference. The Carverian world is a spiritual tundra, an alcoholic wasteland in which the American Dream means disappointment and malaise: not because it has died, but because it never was born. Communion, if it comes at all, comes from minor human interaction. Forget about grace; grace means a feeble paycheck. If you’re lucky, the electricity won’t be turned off.

  Carver was my first convincing intimation that something might be made from grief, that I myself might fashion artistic assertions from my own failings. There was some rescue in that: my sadness could be useful. Until this time, literature had been a font of pleasure and of wisdom: the satisfaction of beholding a well-carpentered sonnet, the beauty of a novel’s sturdy plinths and joists. But why did reading “Ode to a Nightingale” at fifteen—Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain—how did that relieve my own trendy death wishes? What spell was at work there? To be personally addressed by Keats in that way seemed a wizardry I’d never explain. Later I would understand. Reverse the ineffable and be found. The elemental vitality of the right words in the right order. Name the thing to gain dominion over it. The comfort, the good fortune of finding sentences and stanzas which equipped me with descriptions of my own half-explicable anguishes.

  But how would I be capable of such wizardry, of reversing the ineffable, of naming? Until Carver, I’d been only a dabbler in written words: a sheaf of stray lines, impulsive poems, what might have made a song lyric for an especially inept rock vocalist—what Proust once dismissed as “merely phrase-making.” Instinctive volleys of self-expression. But there was no assertion, no armature, no order, no strivings into the accuracy and surprise of language. In Carver’s expertly built stories, in their sneaky simplicity and demotic prose, I glimpsed possibilities of the architecture I might use. Faulkner, Bellow, Proust: they divested me of whatever motivation I might have had to conceive my own fiction. I could never do that, what they did, how they did it. Bellow’s Augie March seemed not of this world, seemed crafted of a linguistic magic and intelligence I’d need different DNA to perform.

  But Carver’s “Fever,” and “Vitamins,” and “A Small, Good Thing”: those I might attempt. And not just because they were about people I’d known my whole life (the handyman, the salesman, the janitor), or because their sadness let me feel less solitary (literature must be about more than the merely identifiable), but because their sentences and structures contained a crucial quality of the spoken, the conversational. Their narrative ease extended a hand in invitation, and that’s part of why Carver was so beloved by so many, how he influenced so many, because his stories said, I welcome you. Come in.

  And so, seated at a desk in the bedroom of that silent apartment, at a secondhand computer the size of the Liberty Bell, the winter in extended wrath, I began. The telling of stories. The circumstances of which were mine, yes, but, what? Altered somehow. Imagined into order. How should those circumstances proceed? Take an instance from a life—my own, say, or my father’s—and give it shape, augment it into meaning. Let it find its form. Beginning, middle, end. Get characters talking. Have them want something—no, need something. The meaning, the structure of the meaning, would come from the characters’ needs, from finding words that equaled their troubles. Because in life, I was certain, all the meaning had gone missing. Life had none of the symmetries, none of the parallel significances, of literature.

  Is that where those periodic spasms of delight came from, spasms that for a few seconds at a time alleviated my despair? Not because I was expressing my bewilderment through characters who were me but different, my father but different—self-expression is simple: go punch a hole in the wall—but because I was attempting to fashion harmony from disorder, to go in search of what was within me? Attempting to manifest meaning in chaos? Because I was making, because I was naming, and from that making and naming emanated a sense of control, the satisfaction of control? Yes, here was what people inevitably refer to as “a calling.” And the calling felt religious in its specifics, in its choosing of me and not a neighbor, not a friend. And the calling was relief, because I knew then, during those icy maelstroms, and then as the kicking cold relented into the kiss of spring, I knew what my life would be.

  When the time came to step onstage again in April, in Hackensack, New Jersey, I wasn’t prepared. In several ways, my physique was improbably better than it had been at the first contest in August: fifteen pounds heavier, rounder and more symmetrical (I’d got the drug cocktail right). But all that unkind winter I’d despised each workout at inadequate gyms, suffered through each force-fed meal, and without the camaraderie of the Edge, I couldn’t find importance in this any more. I’d skip workouts to begin another story or to reread Carver. During the days leading up to the show, I’d polluted my diet in a manner I could not clean: striations disappeared, one muscle bled into another. I drained a liter of water and fell asleep in my car in the parking lot before prejudging. Victor told me he couldn’t discern a single abdominal muscle from his seat in the audience. It didn’t matter. I took fourth place out of ten and walked offstage. Nowhere among the unreliable acoustics of memory can I locate the song I used, or much of anything else. Not my posing routine, not a single other competitor.

  Friends planned to meet at a nearby diner to glut upon all they’d been forbidden for many weeks, but I drove back to my apartment and inhaled a pound of peanut M&Ms while revising yet another Carver-influenced story, another domestic drama, this one about an intruder who might or might not have broken into the home of a struggling couple. The judges had handed me an embarrassing plastic trophy in Hackensack, and when I moved out of that apartment in May, I placed both of my bodybuilding trophies into the dumpster. Placed them, not dropped them, because although I didn’t want to see them anymore, I also didn’t want to see them broken.

  “One needs a town,” wrote Cesare Pavese, “if only for the pleasure of leaving it.” I left Manville first for a year in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and then for another year in Boston, Massachusetts. And I left for a reason people have always left small towns: not because I didn’t value it, but because I believed that my development waited elsewhere. And because some young writers, after they reach the final page of Hemingway’s or Conrad’s biography, get hit with the fantastic inkling that unless they light out of town, unless they make motion of their lives, they won’t have the raw materials from which to invent compelling literature.

  It’s not true, of course. Dickinson proves that. A garden, a library, and an imagination were her only requirements. O’Connor said that any fiction writer who survived childhood had ample material for her lifetime. But I needed to leave Manville. During my more than two years away, when I wasn’t eyeing the clock at vapid places of employment—a restaurant, a newspaper, a telemarketing firm—I taught myself to write fiction by doing it very badly across six hundred pages, two novels and dozens of stories I would later shred from sheer embarrassment. It would take several more years of practice, and several hundred more pages, for fiction to stop being easy for me, to stop coming in spates, and only when it stopped being easy, only when each sentence became a labor, did I begin producing work that might make it out into the world.

  I’d been to Myrtle Beach with a friend just before my second bodybuilding competition and, while training at a tiny World Gym there, had been offered a job for the summer, what turned out to be glorified janitorial duties. And so I had one more summer among the radiantly hale, though mostly as an observer this time. My bodybuilding and steroid use were finished, but it would take several months of not training for my physique to revert to the string bean it had been before I started with weights in my uncle’s basement. The furnished studio apar
tment I found was part of a complex against a golf course, the rent an unlikely $350 per month, first-floor views of a peripheral and little-visited nook of the course, beyond it undulating green and beige. On the day I arrived, the keg-bellied landlord met me to deliver the keys and, looking into my Buick, said, “Rob you a library?” I’d choked the backseat with eight milk crates of books, several hundred titles I couldn’t do without. When the golf course was vacant, I’d carry Chekhov or Gogol beneath a copse of pines and lie on a mat of needles, trying to work out how they’d achieved such resplendent effects.

  If ever someone asked why I’d quit bodybuilding, I said the truth: I didn’t have the genes to make anything of it. But why quit training entirely? Because some of us, if we can’t do a thing full bore, won’t do it at all. We sense something wasteful, something shameful, in halves. Most of the men in my family are infected with that urge to dichotomy: it’s extremity or nothing. I stayed at bodybuilding for those three years because it had once kept me from the craters of depression, but I must have begun to suspect, in some weakly lit sector of myself, and especially during those final six months, that it couldn’t last, that my future was something else. Did I not miss it? I did. But what I missed was impossible to resurrect. For someone who once could not envisage life without muscle, without the shrine and shelter of a gym, I fled that world with a regretless ease.

  My father visited me in Carolina that summer. I have photos of us on the beach, at my apartment, making golf balls soar at a driving range. He wasn’t a reader but he accepted the manuscript I handed to him, a story I’d recently finished. I can vividly recall him on the sofa with it, reading about a man not unlike him, an about-to-be deserted husband who’s making a last effort to change his wife’s mind. I can see him turning pages with a face that oscillated from puzzlement to surprise, and I can remember precisely what he said when he put it down: “That was a strange one.” In the spring of the following year, when I asked him for a few thousand dollars to spend two months at Harvard Summer School, in a literature class, he wrote the check and I left Carolina for Boston.

  Out from underneath the mortgage of our home, from the debris of his marriage to my mother, he had money again for the first time in more than a decade. He bought a Honda CBR900 that summer, his first motorcycle in twenty-three years. It must have seemed a rebirth to him. He’d said he wanted to ride up to visit me at Harvard Summer School, but that plan, vague from the start, never materialized. He worked all week, Saturday was for resting, Sunday for motorcycle racing.

  The instructor of the literature class laded me with titles for which I’ve always been grateful: Under the Volcano, On the Road, Rock Springs among them. The classroom and campus life, I saw, were considerably better than a collection of part-time drudgeries. My dorm that summer turned into a sexual UN that was as fulfilling, as loving, as anything I’d experienced at the Edge: Japanese and Koreans, Germans and Danes, Brazilians and Turks, most of them dazzling talkers and virtuoso smokers who sated my lungs with Lucky Strikes, all of them gloriously unlike anyone I’d known in Jersey or Carolina. When late August came and they returned to their worlds, I sobbed from the sting of losing them.

  I’d spend another year in Boston, at a soul-smashing job as a telephone enroller of senior citizens who sought frolic on educational trips. In a derelict East Boston walk-up, in an iffy district friends wouldn’t visit, my weekends passed in a galloping solitude, in manias of sentences, none of which would be salvageable. The apartment canted toward the back, buckled in the middle. I’d sit on the lopsided porch meshed in with broken screens, half expecting it to crumble under me, exhaling smoke at the gloomy view of red-brick walls and the detritus of lives. That whole winter was a cocoon, winter as only New England knows winter.

  In the closing weeks of the following summer, I returned to New Jersey to attend Drew University. My father helped me sardine my stuff into his work van, the same van my brother and I would clean out the week of his death. He then drove me the forty minutes north to the town of Madison and we toted crates of books and clothes into my dorm room, a garden-level double I’d have to myself. I could see from his face that he was delighted for me. “Not bad,” he said, inspecting the closet, the bathroom, the desk drawers. “Not too bad.” Out in the cul-de-sac where we’d parked, he passed me a hundred-dollar bill, and we embraced there, stiffly and manfully, in the August afternoon.

  The last photos I’d ever take of him would be in that same cul-de-sac, two years later, on a Sunday in mid-spring, just a month before his fatal motorcycle crash. He stopped to visit me on his new bike, a Yamaha R1, wearing full racing regalia, and the photos show him as he was about to leave: pulling on his gloves, strapping on his helmet, tightening his boots. In one shot, taken before he zipped the suit to his throat, there’s something I only recently noticed, something I’d forgotten: tucked against his chest is my first story publication, a glossy magazine that has long since been shuttered. He’d spotted copies on my desk and asked to have one. There’s only a sliver of the magazine visible, and in all the hours I’d spent looking at these photos since his death, I’d mistaken it for his T-shirt. Whether or not he’d read the story in the month he had left to live, I cannot say. But he’d made that gesture for me, that show of interest I imagine must have been genuine.

  I watched him pull away that afternoon, glide slowly from the cul-de-sac and through the wooded lanes, the bike’s chrome-throated growl fearsome and majestic in the Sunday calm of campus. When I could no longer see him, I could still hear the engine as it approached the front gate. I waited there, my breath quickened, and when he made it to the main road, he hit the throttle, and I listened to the air-slicing wail, the aluminum song of his rising through first gear, through second, through third, his sublime screaming toward the highway that would take him home.

  BOOK II

  We die with the dying:

  See, they depart, and we go with them.

  We are born with the dead:

  See, they return, and bring us with them.

  —T. S. Eliot

  I

  One of Pop’s many motorcycle crashes, the specifics of which have not faded in the thirty years since he first told me this story:

  A summer Sunday in 1981, in Flemington, New Jersey, half an hour from Manville. He and the group blazing down a rural road, past soybean crops, patches of maple, red barns worn from weather, a green John Deere windrower, farmland furrowed in the distance. They were headed to the back roads of Pennsylvania, Pop in the lead, as he always was. A steep dip ahead, a hundred feet away, eighty feet, maybe less. His buddy behind him cranked the gas, rushed up on the left, passed the pack of fifteen riders in the oncoming lane. But there was that dip there and you couldn’t see into it. This guy thought he’d pass all his pals and then dash back into the right lane before he reached the dip, the leader now, the mighty one, the quick. But that dip wouldn’t budge, and he was doing a hundred miles per hour on the wrong side of the road.

  First the car’s roof. Then the car’s windshield. Then the car’s grille. The swordfish glint of this car, its chrome teeth. The car was right there, emerging up from the dip in the road. In less than a second it appeared there. Whatever color that car was, however the blue or green or red metal might have glinted in the day’s light, that was the new color of death. Sixty-five miles per hour charging at one hundred–plus. And in that second—not split second, as the cliché has it, but shattered second—Pop had this thought: He’s dead and I’m clear. Those were the five monosyllabic words that occurred to him when he spotted the swordfish glint of that car rise from the dip. He’s dead and I’m clear. His buddy hit the car head-on with a velocity that exploded all his major organs. He launched through the air and was dead before he even touched the pavement. He was thirty-six years old.

  Pop was right: he himself was clear. But when he glanced down, his bike wasn’t under him anymore. The motorcycle had disappeared. He was moving through the air in the same seated position,
at the same speed, but the bike was gone. It was then that he realized: his buddy’s bike, when it collided with the car, went down and shot to the right, shot directly into Pop, taking his own bike out from under him. His thought just then: I’m finished.

  The trees blurred by. He hit the road, then rose again. Hit the road, then rose, the blurring trees. He thought, Keep tucked in. So he tucked himself in, his limbs, his head, as he hit the road and rose. He could hear, could feel, the gritty rub, the coarse grind of his helmet against the asphalt each time he dropped. Then he thought, I’m not breaking up. And by some magic, he really wasn’t. But now he was sliding, a bobsledder with no sled, and he thought, If my leathers hold, I walk away. The leathers grated, scraped across the asphalt, but it was a good one-piece hide, a sturdy American-made product. And it held. He did not break up.

  Three hundred feet from where he had just lost his bike and his buddy of many years, Pop collided into an oak, stopped there at the base of it, his face shield smashed but all his blood on the inside still. His bones, organs, memories all intact. And when he walked back three hundred feet to the body in the road—it looked like dropped laundry lying there—he walked on quivering legs, searching in the ditch and weeds for his bike.

  I have the newspaper clipping here before me, stiff and stained flaxen from time and water damage. The bike is crumpled in the road, bleeding a lake of fuel from its tank. The car, a Datsun or VW, has its entire left side bashed in, the hood hideously buckled, the bumper hanging, windshield gone. A rope snakes in the shoulder to mark where the body landed, a full one hundred feet from the collision—shaped, it seems, like a man in fetal sleep. “His helmet,” writes the reporter, “was found in a field adjacent to the road,” and then the police chief is quoted: “It just popped right off his head.”