What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves—that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination? I remember a day when he was out working and I was alone in his house writing. I heard a raven fly by in air so still that each slow stroke of its wings was distinctly audible. I wondered then and wonder now how I could give all this up for what cities and people have to offer, for it ought to be less terrible to be lonely than to have stepped out of this sense of a symbolic order that the world of animals and celestial light offers, but writing is lonely enough, a confession to which there will be no immediate or commensurate answer, an opening statement in a conversation that falls silent or takes place long afterward without the author. But the best writing appears like those animals, sudden, self-possessed, telling everything and nothing, words approaching wordlessness. Maybe writing is its own desert, its own wilderness.
There are moments of harmony that rise to the level of serendipity, coincidence, and beyond, and certain passages of time that seem dense with such incidents. Summers and deserts seem best for them. I remember lying in the shade of my truck in the Great Basin reading The Divine Comedy. As I finished the last lines of the Paradiso, when Dante approaches the light and is turned like a wheel by “the love which moves the sun and other stars,” a car pulled up. The Franciscan father who ministered to Skid Row characters in Las Vegas and to the cause of peace in the desert stepped out, a comic saint with a thick Breton accent who seemed to have driven up straight out of paradise into that desert that resonated so much with Dante’s tale. Or a time walking in another desert when I thought of the obsidian bird-point arrowhead I’d found in that area the year before, then recollected the creamy chert arrowhead a man had given me since then, and with the latter picture in my head looked down to see its twin, another pale arrowhead with a wide base, a perfect match two thousand miles away six months later, so startling a coincidence that my sense of cause and effect was rattled for a day. Countless times when I traveled hundreds of miles to meet a friend who arrived simultaneously at our remote destination, when what we were looking for appeared unexpectedly, when two people spoke the same thought in the same words at once. Such moments seem to mean that you have surrendered to the story being told and are following the story line rather than trying to tell it yourself, your puny voice interrupting and arguing with fate, nature, the gods.
One perfect midsummer day three years after that evening I’d arrived in the hermit’s life and he in mine, I had gotten up early in that shack whose back bedroom window opened onto one of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen and whose kitchen window was up against a slope, so that as I filled the kettle I was eye to eye with a young cottontail, unafraid as I remained unseen through the glass, its eye a round black mirror for creosote bush and window frame. The yard was full of cottontails that day, and then I found a huge desert tortoise strolling up to chomp on the prickly pears, as though we had stumbled into the fable of the tortoise and the hare, whose dispositions I often imagined as the hermit’s and mine, he so reserved, deliberate, patient, I so quick and high-strung. I told the neighbor and the hermit, and they came out and, in the manner of men, let on that they had seen tortoises as big. Have you ever seen one bigger, I asked, and they fell silent, watching the creature open a beaky mouth and cut cactus with slow menace. That evening we went to feed the cats of an acquaintance who was away, and inside the house we found the three creatures stalking a mourning dove fluttering bloody around the big room. While I fended off the cats, he caught the creature. It vanished into his hands, and this seemed to calm it until we got outside. He raised his hands up and the dove flew into the last light, more alive than we’d hoped.
An idyll like that wasn’t made to last. For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart. There isn’t a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers. It’s a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine that you could ever live in another house, big where this one was small, small where it was big, hard when your body has learned all the twists and turns of the staircase so that you could walk it in your sleep, hard when you have built it from scratch and called it home, hard to imagine building again. But you lit the fire that burned it down yourself.
A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn’t. The stories don’t fit back together, and it’s the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. Though I came out of this house transformed, stronger and surer than I had been, and carrying with me more knowledge of myself, of men, of love, of deserts and wildernesses.
The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story or the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free. I went away for the summer, back to the desert I had been headed for when I detoured his way the evening of the kangaroo mouse, all those years before. Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked. Out in the small house in that desert one of the insects called walking sticks took up residence on one of the windows, and after I poked it to make sure it wasn’t a stray bit of straw, I took to talking to it occasionally, so companionable was it. A spider with an image like a foolishly smiling face on her big white abdomen dwelt in the eaves over the door I passed through to write. Paper wasps built nests in those eaves. All around the little house Mexican grasshoppers flung out their wings, black, yellow, and scarlet, vivid like butterflies while they flew, drab again when they landed. Bumblebees landed on coneflowers that dipped halfway to the ground under their weight. Occasionally a velvet ant upholstered in red or yellow plush walked by, and black beetles with a forward tilt left tiny trails in the dust.
There were lizards in abundance, and when they climbed the screens of the windows, I was delighted as I’d always been by the azure stripes on the undersides of the species we always called bluebellies. They kept drowning in the horse trough under the drainpipe, where they would float pale and hapless like sailors in a Victorian shipwreck poem. In the distance was the celestial drama of summer thunderstorms, clouds assembling in vast arrays that demonstrated how far the sky went and how high, that shifted from the bundled white cumulus into the deep blue of storm clouds, and when we were lucky, poured down rain and lightning and shafts of light and vapor trails like a violent redemption. It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and the vast distances of heaven, as though my own scale had been eliminated along with the middle ground, and this too is one of the austere luxuries of the desert.
In the fall, I went back to the city and began to compose a story in my head. I was already working on a book then, or I
would have written it down. Now it is as decayed as a real book might be after being buried or abandoned, and when I think of the scraps that remain, I wonder what weather in the mind so erodes such things.
Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo is sometimes described as a love letter to San Francisco, though its subject is a romance between the protagonist, an ex-detective with vertigo, and the woman he’s hired to pursue. The woman is supposed to be Madeleine, the heiress who married his college friend Gavin Elster. Elster hires the detective to tail her, and in a monologue cut from the movie says that when he brought her to San Francisco, “She was like a child come home. Everything about the city excited her; she had to walk all the hills, explore the edge of the ocean, see all the old houses and wander the old streets; and when she came upon something unchanged, something that was as it had been, her delight was so strong, so fiercely possessive! These things were hers. And yet she had never been here before. . . . She possessed it,” he says of her relationship to the city. “And then one day she changed again . . . and a great sigh settled on her, and the cloud came into her eyes. I don’t know what happened that day, where she went, what she saw, what she did. But on that day, the search was ended. She had found what she was looking for. She had come home. And something in the city possessed her.” She is supposed to be haunted by her Latina ancestress who died forlorn and mad, the betrayed mistress of a wealthy San Francisco man. The Madeleine in the movie wears a pale gray suit, has hair so blond it’s almost white, drives a green Jaguar, is cool, mysterious, an elusive vision for the detective to follow.
And he follows her to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge where she throws herself into the waves, to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor out at Land’s End in the city’s wild northwest, to the overgrown little cemetery at Mission Dolores, up and down the streets of downtown, so that the plot is a fiction but the film is an evocation of real places, all familiar ones to me, though here seen before I was born. He goes with her to a redwood forest where one of those crosscut redwood logs becomes a map of deep time—she points to tree rings from the nineteenth century and says, “Here I was born” and “here I died.” Finally they go to another outlying mission where she leaps to her death from the bell tower before he, afflicted with vertigo, can follow her up the stairs. While recovering from his subsequent breakdown, he meets a brassy salesgirl from the elegant Magnin’s department store downtown and, struck by her resemblance to Madeleine, dates her, dresses rather than undresses her, and forces her to come closer and closer to becoming Madeleine. Torn between love and judgment, she gives in. Finally, when Judy has the same pale hair, the same gray suit as the first woman he had followed and recklessly puts on a necklace that woman owned, he realizes that she was Madeleine, or rather that Madeleine never existed, that he had fallen in love with a scheme to cover up the murder of the real Mrs. Elster who was pushed from the tower that he, with his vertigo, could not ascend. The plot was concocted by Elster when the salesgirl was his mistress, but she was discarded afterward and is being discarded in another way by the detective determined she become someone else, someone dead. When he realizes the ruse, he forces her to return to the railless bell tower platform where Mrs. Elster was pushed to her death and, startled by a shadowy nun come up behind them, she backs up and is dead again.
Vertigo is an intricate tragedy, sometimes compared to Shakespeare, though it might be closer to The Great Gatsby, for part of the detective’s desire is for her apparent aristocracy, her cool-colored evasion that he follows to the edge of death, the unreachable that for Gatsby is the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and for Gatsby’s author is the irrecoverable past, the orgiastic future, the famous fresh green breast of the continent itself. There are Parisian novels in which love of a woman and love of the city become the same passion, though a lonely one in which wandering, stalking, haunting are consummation, and real communion is unimaginable. The same might be true of Vertigo, that Madeleine becomes what one of San Francisco’s bad poets once called “the cool gray city of love,” but neither hero nor heroine seems to much notice the places the camera caresses and probes. Told from the man’s point of view, Vertigo is awash with romantic fog, but from the woman’s perspective, it’s about being forced to disappear—not from the top of a tower, but in everyday life as two successive lovers make her into someone else for their own ends, a common enough tragedy.
Most crabs come complete with their own shells, but the asymmetrical bodies of hermit crabs are usually described as soft and vulnerable. They take up residence in the shells of snails, whelks, periwinkles, and other hard-shelled creatures, and their body curves within the new home, a set of internal limbs holding onto the shell while big external claws find food and defend the crab from the outside world. The hermit crab: grabbing on one side and clinging on the other. Eventually the creature outgrows the shell, and thus comes the risky moment called the molt, when the crab is between shells. Sometimes it investigates a new shell before it molts and if the shell doesn’t fit, slips back into the old one; sometimes it chases another crab out of a good-looking shell or eats a dead creature to empty out its shell. They are scavengers crawling the floor of the sea. Male hermit crabs often drag a female around by her claw, fighting off rival suitors, until she molts. Only when she is between shells can they mate. Their tiny young are borne along on the current until they reach a stage when they drop to the ocean floor and must quickly find a shell for protection, and thus begin adult life. Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.
I had seen Vertigo on the big screen again a year or so earlier, and one scene captivated me. In the first scene, the detective almost falls to his death, the incident from which he derives his vertigo; in the second he’s at the home of an old friend. She lives in an apartment with drawings and paintings hung everywhere but the windows opening out onto sweeping views of the city below, makes her living drawing lingerie, and calls him Johnny while everyone else calls him Scottie. While he lounges, she chats with him and sketches a “revolutionary uplift” bra designed “on the principle of the cantilevered bridge”: body as a vertiginous landscape, breasts a Golden Gate Bridge to jump from. Midge has hair almost as blond as Madeleine’s, though big glasses, a sensible bob, and her nickname ensure she won’t seem seductive. But her voice is like vanilla ice cream and when the detective complains about the corset he wears for his injured back and wonders whether many men wear them, she replies smoothly, “Quite a few.” He sits upright and demands, “Do you know that from personal experience?” and she laughs and changes the subject.
Though she’s full of what the French call jouissance, an erotic joy, she doesn’t exist in the French novel from which Vertigo was adapted. An American screenwriter made her up. Most who write about the film seem to forget that it’s she who broke off her engagement with the detective, as that initial scene reveals, and the screenwriters and director themselves seem to forget it in later passages when she becomes a far more conventional character with a sad, defeated devotion to Scottie. E. M. Forster wrote that novels have round and flat characters, and the flat ones are usually the minor figures, but Vertigo is a film with a paper doll Tristan and Iseult sliding across the foreground and this round figure making one startling appearance. She is an invitation to go in another direction than the tragic one of the film, for though the movie is in love with San Francisco, she is the only character who really seems immersed in the city’s possibilities, and though the protagonists are driven in pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction, she seems to live amidst them. I began to tell myself a story—a novel if I wrote it down—about Midge.
When I was nineteen I wrote a play, badly. A woman hired a detective to find her vanished mate, and all the scenes took place in her room. The detective, through his investigations and conversations with her, comes to
believe at various points that the missing man never existed, because she’s mad or because she’s invented the story to seduce him, or that he himself is one way or another that man and is mad himself. “Lost and Found,” I called it. It was about yearning, about deception, about how she used the tale of having lost something to find something or to define something. Other fictions ran through my head at various times, and I would elaborate on some stories and characters for years, but they weren’t what I was here for. Nonfiction seems to me photographic; it poses the same challenge of finding form and pattern in the stuff already out there and the same ethical obligations to the subject. Fiction like painting lets you start with a blank canvas, though as I began to turn this version of Vertigo into a story I called “Slip,” I remembered what kind of truth fiction has: of the universal principles and the telling details, the minutiae that can add up to stories if you build characters around them. (In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters down to the surprise denouement.) In “Slip,” Midge was just a childhood nickname for a woman called Margaretta and the detective a childhood sweet-heart she outgrew.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost Page 10
