by John Irving
"An otter is a lot faster in the water than a muskrat," Charlie told me.
"I see," I said. We sat for an hour or two, and Charlie told me how the water level of Georgian Bay-and of all of Lake Huron-was changing; every year, it changes. He said he was worried that the acid rain-from the United States-was starting to kill the lake, beginning, as it always does (he said), with the bottom of the food chain.
"I see," I said.
"The weeds have changed, the algae have changed, you can't catch the pike you used to-and one otter hasn't killed all these clams!" he said, indicating the shells.
"I see," I said. Then, when Charlie was peeing-in "the bush," as Canadians say-an animal about the size of a small beagle, with a flattened sort of head and dark-brown fur, swam out from the shore.
"Charlie!" I called. The animal dove; it did not come up again. One of the children was instantly beside me.
"What was it?" the child asked.
"I don't know," said.
"Did it have a flattened tail?" Charlie called from the bush.
"It had a flattened sort of head," I said.
"That's a muskrat," one of the children said.
"You didn't see it," said his sister.
"What kind of tail did it have?" Charlie called.
"I didn't see its tail," I admitted.
"It was that fast, huh?" Charlie asked me-emerging from the bush, zipping up his fly.
"It was pretty fast, I guess," I said.
"It was an otter," he said. (I am tempted to say it was a "nonpracticing homosexual," but I don't).
"See the duck?" a little girl asked me.
"That was no duck, you fool," her brother said.
"You didn't see it-it dove!" the girl said.
"It was a female something," someone else said.
"Oh, what do you know?" another child said.
"I didn't see anything," I said.
"Look over there-just keep looking," Charlie Keeling said to me. "It has to come up for air," he explained. "It's probably a pintail or a mallard or a blue-winged teal-if it's a female," he said. The pines smell wonderful, and the lichen on the rocks smell wonderful, and even the smell of fresh water is wonderful-or is it, really, the smell of some organic rot that is carrying on, just under the surface of all that water? I don't know what makes a lake smell that way, but it's wonderful. I could ask the Keeling family to tell me why the lake smells that way, but I prefer the silence-just the breeze that's almost constant in the pines, the lap of the waves, and the gulls' cries, and the shrieks of the terns.
"That's a Caspian tern," one of the Keeling boys said to me. "See the long red bill, see the black feet?"
"I see," I said. But I wasn't paying attention to the tern; I was remembering the letter I wrote to Owen Meany in the summer of . Dan Needham had told me that he had seen Owen one Sunday in the Gravesend Academy gym. Dan said that Owen had the basketball, but he wasn't shooting; he was standing at the foul line, just looking up at the basket-he wasn't even dribbling the ball, and he wouldn't take a shot. Dan said it was the strangest thing.
"He was just standing there," Dan said. "I must have watched him for five minutes, and he didn't move a muscle- he just held the ball and stared at the basket. He's so small, you know, the basket must look like it's a mile away."
"He was probably thinking about the shot," I told Dan.
"Well, I didn't bother him," Dan said. "Whatever he was thinking about, he was concentrating so hard he didn't see me-I didn't even say hello. I don't think he would have heard me, anyway," Dan said. Hearing about him made me even miss practicing that stupid shot; and so I wrote to him, just casually-since when would a twenty-year-old actually come out and say he missed his best friend?
"Dear Owen," I wrote him. "What are you up to? It's kind of boring here. I like the work in the woods best-I mean, the logging. Except there are deer flies. The work at the sawmill, and in the lumberyards, is much hotter-but there are no deer flies. Uncle Alfred insists that Loveless Lake is 'potable'-he says we have swallowed so much of it, we would be dead if it weren't. But Noah says there's much more piss and shit in it than there is in the ocean. I miss the beach-how's the beach this summer? Maybe next summer your father would give me a job in the quarries?"
He wrote back; he didn't bother to begin with the usual "Dear John"- had his own style, nothing fancy, strictly capitals.
"ARE YOU CRAZY?" Owen wrote me. "YOU WANT TO WORK IN THE QUARRIES? YOU THINK IT'S HOT IN A LUMBERYARD? MY FATHER DOESN'T DO A LOT OF HIRING-AND I'M SURE HE WON'T PAY YOU AS MUCH AS YOUR UNCLE ALFRED. IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE YOU HAVEN'T MET THE RIGHT GIRL UP THERE."
"So how's Hester?" I asked him, when I wrote him back. "Be sure to tell her that I love her room-that'll piss her off! I don't suppose she's been helping you practice the shot-if you lose your touch, that'll be too bad. You were so close to doing it in under three seconds."
He wrote back immediately. "UNDER THREE SECONDS IS DEFINITELY POSSIBLE. I HAVEN'T BEEN PRACTICING BUT THINKING ABOUT IT IS ALMOST AS GOOD. MY FATHER WILL HIRE YOU NEXT SUMMER-IT WON'T BE TOO BAD IF YOU START OUT SLOWLY, MAYBE IN THE MONUMENT SHOP. BY THE WAY, THE BEACH HAS BEEN GREAT-LOTS OF GOOD-LOOKING GIRLS AROUND, AND CAROLINE O'DAY HAS BEEN ASKING ABOUT YOU. YOU OUGHT TO SEE HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE'S NOT WEARING HER ST. MICHAEL'S UNIFORM. SAW DAN ON HIS BICYCLE-HE SHOULD LOSE A LITTLE WEIGHT. AND HESTER AND I SPENT AN EVENING WITH YOUR GRANDMOTHER; WE WATCHED THE IDIOT BOX, OF COURSE, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE HEARD YOUR GRANDMOTHER ON THE SUBJECT OF THE GENEVA CONFERENCE-SHE SAID SHE'D BELIEVE IN THE 'NEUTRALITY' OF LAOS WHEN THE SOVIETS DECIDED TO RELOCATE ... ON THE MOON! SHE SAID SHE'D BELIEVE IN THE GENEVA ACCORDS WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING BUT PARROTS AND MONKEYS MOVING ALONG THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL! I WON'T REPEAT WHAT HESTER SAID ABOUT YOU USING HER ROOM-IT'S THE SAME THING SHE SAYS ABOUT HER MOTHER AND FATHER AND NOAH AND SIMON AND . ALL THE GIRLS ON LOVELESS LAKE, SO PERHAPS YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH THE EXPRESSION."
I wrote a letter to Caroline O'Day; she never answered me. It was August, . I remember one very hot day-humid, with a hazy sky; a thunderstorm was threatening, but it never came. It was very much like the day of my mother's wedding, before the storm; it was what Owen Meany and I called typical Gravesend weather. Noah and Simon and I were logging; the deer flies were driving us crazy, and there were mosquitoes, too. Simon was the easiest to drive crazy; of the three of us, the deer flies and mosquitoes liked Simon the best. Logging is most dangerous if you're impatient; saws and axes, peaveys and cant dogs-these tools belong in patient hands. Simon got a little sloppy and reckless with his cant dog-he chased after a deer fly with the hook end and speared himself in the calf. It was a deep gash, about three or four inches long-not serious; but he would require some stitches to close the wound, and a tetanus shot. Noah and I were elated; even Simon, who had a high tolerance for pain, was pretty pleased-the injury meant we could all get out of the woods. We drove the Jeep out the logging road to Noah's Chevy; we took the Chevy out on the highway, through Sawyer Depot and Conway, to the emergency entrance of the North Conway Hospital. There'd been an automobile accident somewhere near the Maine border, so Simon rated a low priority in the emergency room; that was fine with all of us, because the longer it took for Simon to get his tetanus shot and his stitches, the longer we would be away from the deer flies and the mosquitoes and the heat. Simon even pretended not to know if he was allergic to anything; Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred had to be called, and that took more time. Noah started flirting with one of the nurses; with any luck, Noah knew, we could fart around the whole rest of the day, and never go back to work. One of the less-mangled victims of the auto accident sat in the waiting room with us. He was someone Noah and Simon knew vaguely-a type not uncommon in the north country, one of those ski bums who don't seem to know what to do with themselves when there isn't any snow. This was a guy who'd been drinking a bottle of beer when one car hit another; he'd been the driver of one of the cars, he said, and the bottleneck had broken in his mouth on impact-he had lacerations on the
roof of his mouth, and his gums were slashed, and the broken neck of the bottle had pierced his cheek. He proudly showed us the lacerations inside his mouth, and the hole in his cheek-all the while mopping up his mouth and face with a blood-soaked wad of gauze, which he periodically wrung out in a blood-soaked towel. He was precisely the sort of north country lunatic who gave Hester great disdain for Sawyer Depot, and led her to maintain her residence in the college community of Durham year 'round.
"Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?" the ski bum asked us. We were prepared for a dirty joke-an absolutely filthy joke. The ski bum's smile was a bleeding gash in his face; his smile was the repulsive equal to his gaping wound in his cheek. He was lascivious, depraved-our much-appreciated holiday in the emergency room had taken a nasty turn. We tried to ignore him.
"Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?" he asked us again. Suddenly, it didn't sound like a joke. Maybe it's about the Kennedys! I thought.
"No. What about her?" I said.
"She's dead," the ski bum said. He took such a sadistic pleasure in his announcement, his smile appeared to pump the blood out of his mouth and the hole in his cheek; I thought that he was as pleased by the shock value of what he had to say as he was thrilled by the spectacle of wringing his own blood from the sodden gauze pad into the sodden towel. Forever after, I would see his bleeding face whenever I imagined how Larry Lish and his mother must have responded to this news; how eagerly, how greedily they must have spread the word! "Have you heard? You mean, you haven't heard!" The rapture of so much amateur conjecturing and surmising would flush their faces as irrepressibly as blood!
"How?" I asked the ski bum.
"An overdose," he said; he sounded disappointed-as if he'd been hoping for something bloodier. "Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was suicide," he said. Maybe it was the Kennedys, I thought. It made me feel afraid; at first, that summer, it was something vague that had made me feel afraid. Now something concrete made me feel afraid-but my fear itself was still vague: what could Marilyn Monroe's death ever have to do with me!
"IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US," said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. "SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR
WHOLE COUNTRY-NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING-I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE-JOE DIMAG-GIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEMl LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT'S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY-AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY," he repeated; he was on a roll. I could hear Hester playing her guitar in the background, as if she were trying to improvise a folk song from everything he said. "AND THOSE MEN," he said. "THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN-DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN'T HAVE LOVED HER-THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL. THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY-IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON'T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD-THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL. THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT KENNEDY WAS: A MORALIST. BUT HE WAS JUST GIVING US A SNOW JOB, HE WAS JUST BEING A GOOD SEDUCER. I THOUGHT HE WAS A SAVIOR. I THOUGHT HE WANTED TO USE HIS POWER TO DO GOOD. BUT PEOPLE WILL SAY AND DO ANYTHING JUST TO GET THE POWER; THEN THEY'LL USE THE POWER JUST TO GET A THRILL. MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN-MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN-SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUN- TRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT'S WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME," said Owen Meany. "WE'RE GOING TO BE USED."
Georgian Bay: July , -The Toronto Star says that President Reagan "actually led the first efforts to conceal essential details of his secret arms-for-hostages program and keep it alive after it became public." The Toronto Star added that "the President subsequently made misleading statements about the arms sales"-on four separate occasions'. Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement-against the Vietnam War-was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all. Look at the United States today. Are they drafting young Americans to fight in Nicaragua? No; not yet. Are masses of young Americans outraged at the Reagan administration's shoddy and deceitful behavior? Ho hum; not hardly. I know what Owen Meany would say about that; I know what he did say-and it still applies.
"THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM," Owen said. He said that once-when Hester proposed abolishing the draft. "IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT," said Owen Meany, "MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE'RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD."
I saw a mink run under the boathouse today; it had such a slender body, it was only slightly larger than a weasel-with a weasel's undulating movement. It had such a thick, glossy coat of fur, I was instantly reminded of Larry Lish's mother. Where is she now? I wondered. I know where Larry Lish is; he's a well-known journalist in New York-"an investigative reporter" is what he's called. I've read a few of his pieces; they're not bad-he was always clever-and I notice that he's acquired a necessary quality in his voice ("necessary," I think, if a journalist is going to make a name for himself, and gain an audience, and so forth). Larry Lish has become particularly self-righteous, and the quality in
his voice that I call "necessary" is a tone of moral indignation. Larry Lish has become a moralist-imagine that! I wonder what his mother has become. If she got the right guy to marry her-before it was too late-maybe Mitzy Lish has become a moralist, too! In the fall of ' when Owen Meany and I began our life as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire, we enjoyed certain advantages that set us apart from our lowly, less-experienced peers. We were not subject to dormitory rules because we lived at home-we were commuters from Graves-end and were permitted to park our own means of transportation on campus, which other freshmen were not allowed to do. I divided my at-home time between Dan and my grandmother; this had an added advantage, in that when there was a late-night university party in Durham, I could tell Dan I was staying with my grandmother and tell Grandmother I was staying with Dan-and never come home! Owen was not required to be home at any special time; considering that he spent every night of the summer at Hester's apartment, I was surprised that he was going through the motions of living at home at all. Hester's roommates were back, however; if Owen stayed at Hester's, there was no question regarding the bed in which he spent the night-whether he and Hester "did it" or not, they were at least familiar with the intimate proximity that Hester's queen-size mattress forced upon them. But once our classes began, Owen didn't sleep at Hester's apartment more than once or twice a week. Our other advantages over our fellow freshmen were several. We had suffered the academic rigors of Gravesend Academy; the course work at the University of New Hampshire was very easy in comparison. I benefited greatly from this, because-as Owen had taught me-I chiefly needed to give myself more time to do the work assigned. So much less work was assigned than what I had learned to expect from the academy that-for once-I had ample time. I got good grades, almost easily; and for the first time-although this took two or three years-I began to think of myself as "smart." But the relatively undemanding expectations of the university had quite a different effect on Owen Meany. He could do everything he was asked without half trying, and this made him lazy. He quickly fell into a habit of getting no better grades than he needed to satisfy his ROTC "schol- arship"; to my surprise, his best grades
were always in the ROTC courses-in so-called Military Science. We took many of the same classes; in English and History, I actually got better grades than Owen-had become indifferent about his writing!
"I AM DEVELOPING A MINIMALIST'S STYLE," he told our English teacher, who'd complained that Owen never expanded a single point in any of his papers; he never employed more than one example for each point he made. "FIRST YOU TELL ME I CAN'T WRITE USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, NOW YOU WANT ME TO 'ELABORATE'-TO BE MORE 'EXPANSIVE.' IS THAT CONSISTENT?" he asked our English teacher. "MAYBE YOU WANT ME TO CHANGE MY PERSONALITY, TOO?"
If, at Gravesend Academy, had persuaded the majority of the faculty that his eccentricities and peculiarities were not only his individual rights but were inseparable from his generally acknowledged brilliance, the more diverse but also more specialized faculty at the University of New Hampshire were not interested in "the whole boy," not at all; they were not even a community, the university faculty, and they shared no general opinion that Owen Meany was brilliant, they expressed no general concern that his individual rights needed protection, and they had no tolerance for eccentricities and peculiarities. The classes they taught were for no student's special development; their interests were the subject themselves-their passions were for the politics of the university, or of their own departments within it-and their overall view of us students was that we should conform ourselves to their methods of their disciplines of study. Owen Meany, who had been so conspicuous-all my life-was easily overlooked at the University of New Hampshire. He was in none of his classes as distinguished as the tomato-red pickup, which was so readily distinguishable among the many economy-model cars that most parents bought for most students who had their own cars-my grandmother had bought me a Volkswagen Beetle; in the campus parking lots, there were so many VWs of the same year and navy-blue color that I could identify mine only by its license plate or by the familiarity of whatever I had left on the back seat. And although Owen and I first counted Hester's friendship as an advantage, her friendship was another means by which
