Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  As always, Officer Lotts was the first one there. He had claimed our favorite table and was sipping a glass of pinot grigio while reading the Times and waiting for the rest of us. He is an unusual cop. A late child of middle-aged parents who took him around the world and gave him everything under the sun including a leafy suburban life, every album ever made, and a gleaming white convertible with tan leather interior when he was sixteen, Steve Lotts started saying at the age of four that he wanted to be a Chicago policeman. “Sure,” people said, “good!” But he was still saying it when he went to college to study criminal justice, and still saying it after a year spent as a guard at a nuclear-power plant, two and a half as a paralegal, and four as an internal-affairs investigator when he was finally admitted to the police academy. Even then people were sure he would bail out and head for the suburbs, but today he is an undercover gang-crimes cop who is on the street every day and often night, and is one of the few people I know who truly loves his work. He lives in an apartment full of plants and cats, wears horn-rimmed glasses and a Little Lord Fauntleroy haircut, and attracts wistful, waifish women.

  “Ride your bike?” I pulled out a stool.

  “Yep.” He pointed at it through the window locked to a parking meter.

  “Armed?” I asked lifting up his backpack.

  “Of course,” he said. He rarely goes anywhere without his gun. I had been waiting all week to talk about Lisa Kim, and I almost told Steve the story right then, but I knew I’d only have to repeat it later, so I didn’t. It was difficult.

  Pretty soon everyone was there, laughing, eating, telling stories. Carolyn O’Connor was dating a gastroenterologist from Terre Haute. He took her for a walk through the woods on a farm he owns in Brown County, and in a clearing they came upon a table set with white linen, candles, a lovely meal, glasses of wine already poured. “I have no idea how he did it.” Carolyn smiled; she may have the best smile in the world.

  Carolyn’s family and mine have summer homes in the same Michigan beach resort, and I’ve always known her, although I grew up playing with her older brothers and sisters. Then when she moved to Chicago after law school and rented an apartment with Steve Lotts on Fargo Street two blocks from where Lydia and I were living, we started hanging out with them and with Wendy Spitz, too, a lawyer pal of Carolyn’s from her law firm.

  It was Wendy who turned to me that evening and said, “I read that piece of yours about you and Lydia in Mexico.”

  “Me too,” said Carolyn, “and I have a question for you.”

  “Is it really that beautiful?” Wendy asked.

  “’Course it is,” I said. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Well, you know, travel writers . . .”

  “It’s like paradise,” said Lydia, at the same time pointing out that a lot of beautiful places are full of odd people.

  “Like Charlie Duke,” said Carolyn. “That was my question. Is he a real person?”

  “Oh, he’s real,” said Lydia.

  Wendy said, “What I want to know is is he gay? You never make it clear.”

  There ensued a rambling discussion of our friend Charlie, his sexuality, his drinking habits, the drinking habits of homosexuals, the definition of alcoholism, the trustworthiness of alcoholics, whether it’s possible to be friends with an alcoholic, the nature of friendship, and the nature of love itself. None of this was of any interest to me, but I hadn’t yet seen my opening into Lisa Kim. I crossed my arms and listened. I felt like a sniper lying in wait.

  “But can you love someone you can’t trust?” asked Wendy.

  “Of course you can,” said Carolyn. “Think about children; you love them but can’t trust them. Even most teenagers. Even a lot of old people.”

  “In fact,” I said, “some people can’t love someone they do trust. They lose interest.” I wondered as soon as I said it whether my statement had a subtext, and if it did, I wondered if Lydia had picked up on it.

  I didn’t look at her, but I heard her say, “I don’t think that’s real love.”

  “Oh, who the hell knows what real love is,” I said quickly, flippantly.

  “Quick, change the subject,” said Lydia. “Don’t get him started on love.”

  “Okay, what are we going to read about next, Pete?” asked someone.

  “Thailand. I’m going to Thailand over Christmas.” I told them I wanted to update the whole Europe-on-$5-a-day idea of the sixties. Thailand on $50 a day and then a bunch of other places in Asia and Latin America. “Gee, Pete,” said Steve, “how did you ever think of that?”

  “I don’t suppose you got a free airfare out of this, did you?” asked someone else.

  “Are you going, Lydia?” someone asked.

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I’m waiting for his series on extravagant vacations in ridiculously opulent places. This one’s going to be overnight trains and bad noodle houses and youth hostels with no air conditioning.”

  By now we’d all had a couple of drinks. There was the briefest lull in the conversation, and I pulled the trigger. “I gotta tell you guys about this accident I saw.” For the most part they listened attentively.

  Afterwards Steve asked, “Did you have a cell phone?”

  “No. I wish I did.”

  “So what do you think you could have done?” asked Carolyn.

  “He thinks he could have gotten out, opened her door, turned her car off, and taken the keys,” said Lydia. “That’s what he thinks.”

  “Okay, even if you could have done all of that, what next?” asked Carolyn.

  “What next? I’m not sure,” I said.

  She went on, “I mean, you’re blocking traffic, both lanes. Are you going to drive her car? What about your car?”

  “What if she jumps out and gets run over?” asked Wendy.

  “You could be held responsible,” said Officer Lotts. “You could have been arrested yourself.”

  “For what?”

  “What if she started screaming?” asked someone.

  “Harassment,” said Steve. “Assault. Who knows? Maybe even kidnapping.”

  “But she was out of control! I mean, look what happened for crying out loud.”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t have happened if you’d stopped her.” Wendy said that my only justification for interfering with the drunk girl was that it did happen, and if I’d interfered, it wouldn’t have. No accident, no justification. She said I did the right thing, which was nothing.

  “How could it be the right thing if I had it within my power to save someone’s life, and I didn’t do it?” I asked.

  “But at what risk?” asked Steve. “Your own life, maybe? Our rule is that you act only to help someone else when you are sure that you are safe. Very first priority always is your own safety.”

  “How about the fireman who goes into a burning building to rescue someone?”

  “He doesn’t. He really doesn’t. Not unless he’s damn sure and his supervisor’s damn sure, too, that he can go in and get back safely. A supervisor would never let his people go in there under any other circumstance. It’s rule number one. Secure yourself first. Now if the roof caves in or the building collapses, that’s a different story, but you don’t know that it’s going to happen.”

  “See, I think that’s Pete’s problem,” said Carolyn. “He knew what was going to happen. You know what I mean? He could see it happen before it happened, and then it happened.” (Of course I now know that even if for a moment I could see what was going to happen to Lisa Kim, I had no idea what had already happened to her and would not for a long time.)

  “It’s almost like a tree falling in the woods,” said Wendy.

  “Or like Pandora’s box.” Carolyn said that knowledge of the future was the one thing that didn’t get out of Pandora’s box, and for a moment I had it and was therefore very briefly Godlike. She also said that since I’m Pete Ferry and not God, I wanted to do something human, like fix things.

  “I thought it was hope that d
idn’t get out,” said someone.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ve got a legal question.”

  “No legal questions!” Wendy threw up her hands. “We’re off duty. No free legal advice. Besides, I’m quitting. I’m done with the law.”

  We all moaned. We’d heard this many times.

  “I’m done making rich people richer. I’m sick of this corporate shit. I’m going to do something that matters with my life.” Wendy was off to the races about how she was going to collect her bonus and resign her partnership, sell her condo, see the world, run a marathon, learn Spanish, get an MBA, and move to South America. “Within five years I intend to be the finance minister of a small country somewhere in Latin America!”

  “Ándale!” someone said.

  “I’m going to finally do something fucking important with my life!”

  “Arriba!” we cried. By this time the waitstaff was eyeing us wearily. Later that night I lay awake in bed thinking about doing something important with my life. I was aware even then that something in me had changed. I was not sure what it was or how big it was or how long it would last, but something was different. I had seen another person die. I thought about soldiers who can never quite come all the way back from combat, can never really shop again for tube socks at Wal-Mart or go all out for a foul pop-up or fall asleep on the couch with a book turned over on their chests. Can never even read a book or eat soup or make love without the knowledge of what they’ve done or seen.

  For me right then, it was the knowledge of what I hadn’t done. Oh, I knew that my friends were well-meaning, that they were kind and wise and generous to reassure me and I was sure they were right that any action I would have taken could have failed or backfired or even exacerbated the situation, but they were also missing the point. I saw someone alive, and then I saw her dead, and in between I could have acted at least theoretically, at least hypothetically, to change the dynamic between those two things. Perhaps that’s what had changed. Perhaps I’d never realized before that I could have such power. Perhaps I’d never even thought about it.

  The first real writing I ever did was a bunch of short stories I wrote as a senior thesis at Ohio University for Walter Tevis, and I had been carrying around something that Tevis had said to me ever since, something that despite the fact that I’d spent much of my life writing made me hesitate to call myself a writer.

  I would love to say that Walter Tevis was my mentor, but it would be more accurate to say that I wanted him to be my mentor, and he tried to be, sort of. I don’t think that I was very mentorable because I was only playing at being a writer, trying it on as you might a suit of clothes, and I think he knew that, but he was kind and indulgent and treated me as a mentee even if we both knew we were faking it.

  Tevis was a goofy, gangly, buck-toothed man who knew Paul Newman and drank wine, sometimes too much. I’m not telling tales out of school here; he was candid about his drinking and used to joke that the only day of the year he didn’t drink was New Year’s Eve, “amateur night,” and every New Year’s Day he gave a brunch so he could enjoy his bleary-eyed friends and welcome the new year with a Bloody Mary. About Paul Newman: He had supposedly and very briefly—if at all—attended Ohio University, and we as undergrads were much more impressed that Tevis knew him than that the reason he knew him was because he had written two novels called The Hustler and The Color of Money that had been made into movies starring Newman. This all made Tevis something of a local celebrity, and I considered myself lucky to get into his creative-writing class as a junior and luckier still when he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to sponsor my independent-writing project the year I came back from Oxford.

  I spent the winter quarter sitting up all night in my tiny room smoking cigarettes, drinking Nescafé and typing five rambling, mediocre stories about growing up. Once a week Tevis and I met late in the evening. The hour was partly because we were both night owls and partly, I came to realize, so Tevis would have a reason to open a bottle of Spanish sauterne that was sometimes not his first. We met in his living room at first, but his wife, who had correctly assessed the situation and clearly saw me as a bad influence and facilitator, would walk through glowering at us, so we moved our sessions to the detached garage Tevis had remodeled into a study. It was a small space, and we spent much of our time there avoiding eye contact. I was like that person you know who acquires a friend or girlfriend or wife or even a child because someone else has said that he should, who does and says all the right things, but who is only painting by numbers. We sat there time after time on the outside chance that Tevis might say one day, “He was my student,” and I might say one day, “He taught me everything I know.” But that is much too cynical. Actually, he taught me three very important things:

  (1) He taught me about San Miguel de Allende, a lovely colonial town on the high plateau about three hours north of Mexico City that has a good school of art and one of music, some satellite-language schools, a handsome cathedral on a perfect little plaza, cobblestone streets, cheap inns and posadas, an English-language bookstore, and enough—but not quite too many—Americans. Tevis had gone to San Miguel on the advance he had gotten to write The Hustler and had spent most of his time there filling a drawer with osos negros, the little, black plastic bears that came chained to the necks of vodka bottles. I went there more recently to sit in the sunshine and to write down a good part of this story that you’re reading.

  (2) Tevis also taught me something valuable about the parts and importance of culture, our culture. At the time I knew him, he was busy suing a man named Rudolph Wanderone, whom he claimed had stolen his most valuable creation. One Sunday afternoon on a porch swing in Lexington, Kentucky, while he waited to be called for dinner, Tevis had invented a character out of whole cloth named Minnesota Fats, who would become the universal prototype of the pool hustler. According to Tevis, Wanderone had come along and appropriated the name, and was making lots of money appearing on television as Minnesota Fats. Tevis was spending lots of money trying to prove that Rudolph Wanderone was Rudolph Wanderone. Since it seemed to be a losing battle, I asked him why he was doing it. For once, he answered me seriously. He said, “Pete, I’ve written a few good stories, but I’m not William Faulkner. No one is going to remember my stuff in a hundred years. But every school kid and every old lady in America knows who Minnesota Fats is. He’s mine. I invented him. He’s my little contribution to Americana, and I don’t want that taken away from me.”

  “My goodness,” I thought then and think now, “how wonderful to have given the rest of us Minnesota Fats or the Yellow Brick Road or Kraft marshmallow miniatures. You don’t have to discover penicillin or win the Nobel Peace Prize or write Hamlet. It is enough to have thought up banana fish or invented a ‘friend called Piggy.’”

  (3) But that brings me to the third thing that I learned from Tevis: something about myself. It was a very specific thing tied to a very specific moment, a kind of revelation. We were sitting as usual late at night in Tevis’s little study, and I was trying to sound glib and literary about my stories. Tevis was trying to seem interested. He leaned forward from his chair across the coffee table for the bottle of sauterne, lost his balance, and allowed himself to slowly topple onto the floor at my feet. I was horrified. He was unabashed. I sat primly, knees together like the pastor’s wife. He rolled onto his back and looked at the ceiling. “Pete,” he said, “I know that growing up is hard, I really do, but growing old is awful.” He didn’t stir, but after a while he said, “I like what you are doing, I really do. I think you are sincere, and I think you are talented. You haven’t much to say, but you say it very well.”

  I suppose that ever since, I’ve been looking for something to say. Along the way I’ve done a good bit of writing. Early on I wrote a defiantly plotless novel, got a kind and encouraging rejection letter from a young editor at Alfred Knopf, and published some of its chapters as short stories. I wrote a few other self-consciously literary short stories and even won an award for
one. But mostly what I’ve written has been practical, utilitarian stuff, stuff that speaks for itself. I wrote textbooks, of course, and grant and award applications. I wrote a glossy sixteen-page brochure promoting a $31 million school-building referendum that passed by a mere 400 votes and for which I secretly took almost-complete credit. Lots of other people took almost-complete credit, too, but the thing did win some kind of national award; I have the plaque in my classroom. And over the years I have done a good bit of very subjective, highly personalized travel writing because I became interested in what we do and where we go to give our lives meaning when we don’t or can’t find it at home, when life there becomes too staid and certain and we have to create challenges—even dilemmas—for ourselves because problems are interesting and important and life without them is neither. It is the reason that people join the circus, I think, drink too much, drive too fast, jump off things, jump into things, climb things, run away from home, and paddle into the wilderness. It is also the reason they tell stories.

  2

  …

  Lydia and Lisa

  NOW, I NEED TO TELL YOU about Lydia Greene. This is, of course, my version of the story. There was a time when I thought it was our version, that she would have told you the same story, and up to a certain point in time, she might have.

  Lydia Greene worked at an ad agency with my old high school friend Tom MacMillan, and after college I hung out some with them and a bunch of other agency people. One beery Friday night the three of us discovered that we were all looking for apartments, and by the end of a very long evening at some after-hours bar on the Near North Side feeling confidential, even intimate, in that way that you only can when you’re drunk—I was able to see the other two only by closing one eye—someone was saying, “Listen, guys, each of us needs a bedroom, right?”