Travel Writing
Page 6
I shook my head. What a boob.
4
…
The Love Nazi
I WAS NOT SURE what I was looking for, exactly. It certainly wasn’t Lisa Kim. I knew that she was dead; that much I knew for sure. But it may have been her tracks, her trail, evidence of her, clues about the woman who had written the letter that became for a period of time my most important possession.
Maybe I was trying to get rid of the letter. I was. I wanted to give the letter to Peter Carey or Peter Cleary and put an end to the strange sense of responsibility that had come with it. Responsibility was a thing I’d spent much of my life avoiding. It’s why I lived in an apartment, drove an old car, and worked at a job in which my principal responsibility was to myself and to large children most of whom I could browbeat. It’s why I lived with a woman who didn’t want to get married, and with whom I had no children.
For a long time I thought of responsibility as the other side of freedom, and it was freedom that I most wanted. Not the ramblin’-man freedom of a thousand bad folk songs, although I’d listened to all of these and sung along with a few, but the freedom to live my life on my own terms. It’s another reason—maybe the primary reason—that I love to travel; you’re never freer than when your only responsibility is for yourself and a suitcase. My very personal definition of freedom dated to a time I’d hitchhiked to New Orleans in college. I was two days out of Chicago and somewhere south of St. Louis after I’d stayed up late the night before in Macomb, Illinois, when two soldiers picked me up. I fell asleep in their backseat in the warmth of the late-afternoon sun. When they turned off, they woke me and put me out on the highway, and I realized as I watched them pull away that I didn’t even know what state I was in. I might have been in Missouri, I might have been in Arkansas, and since there had been some talk of Memphis, where I was headed that day, it was possible that we had crossed the river into Tennessee. I didn’t know where I was, and neither did anyone else in the world except the two soldiers now gone. No one. I was frightened especially as the dusk came on, but the air was warm, the sky was clear, and there were fields beside the road in which I could have slept had I needed to, so almost at once my fear turned to something else. I knew in an instant that I’d never been so free, and might never be so free again. I was untethered from all I’d ever known, and when a car slowed to pick me up, I was a little disappointed.
Somehow over time I’d forgotten that feeling, but it had come back to me during the two weeks I’d spent alone in Thailand over Christmas. Again I’d been frightened at first. I was tired to begin with and a bit spooked because we’d come in at night over Vietnam, and the Canadian helicopter pilot sitting beside me on the plane had pointed out the lights of Hue and the black winding ribbon of the Mekong River. Then I’d stepped onto the tarmac at midnight for fourteen days all by myself on the wrong side of the world with nothing but a Lonely Planet guidebook and the address of a cheap hotel I’d found in it. What if my appendix burst, I got run over, or the drunken shrimp fishermen I’d see a few days later in Hua Hin fighting with knives at dawn turned on me? But that, of course, is a part of freedom, and within a day or two, I began to feel comfortable with it and within a day or two more, to appreciate it.
You don’t realize how often you tell lies until you aren’t around the people you know. Not big lies, necessarily or usually. Little lies, but lots of them. Lies about where you want to go to dinner, or when you want to go to bed, or if you want one more glass of wine. How often you say you don’t when you do, you can’t when you can, you won’t when you will. After a while, I began to think about big lies, too.
My only companions were E. M. Forster, a Dutch woman who helped me fix my camera, and an assortment of fellow travelers I fell in with, sat down beside or picked up at various stops along the way. I explored much of Bangkok on foot and much of Thonburi across the Chao Phya River by boat, slept in a berth on the night train to Chiang Mai, shared a communal room in a guesthouse there and played Ping-Pong on the lawn with some Swedish teenagers.
When I got home from Thailand, the apartment seemed smaller and hotter. I almost immediately started lying again and resenting the people I lied to. And I lied to myself. For a month I told myself I was free of Lisa Kim. And then, suddenly, I was responsible for doing something about this damned letter, and after all that freedom, there was a small part of me that liked it, that felt somehow liberated from irresponsibility and surprisingly relieved to be so. And so there I was pulled in two very different directions by a feeling so old I’d nearly forgotten it, and another so new I’d never experienced it; by a desire for freedom and a need to finally be responsible for something in my life. And why all of this was suddenly happening to me I did not know, except that I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be happening if it were not for Lisa Kim, so I went looking for her.
I could not find Peter Carey or Peter Cleary in the phone book, nor Peter Kerry, nor Peter Carray. All the Careys, Clearys, Kerrys, and Carrays I called said “wrong number” when I asked for Peter. The doctors Kim were in the book. Theirs was a large, comfortable, but not ostentatious white clapboard house on a leafy, brick side street a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Its only distinctive feature was a bright yellow front door that I thought instantly must have been Lisa’s idea. Otherwise it was almost nondescript, and I wondered if the Kims, like so many Asian Americans I had known, simply wanted to slip into, fold into society. Down the alley there was a functional two-car garage and in the backyard, a modest flower garden that did not draw attention to itself.
New Trier High School looked like a high school does in the movies. The security guard at the front door sent me to the security office. There a man at a counter looked at my ID. “I’m a freelancer writing for the Tribune. I’m doing research for an article on New Trier grads who are doing things in theater and movies and stuff like that.” He issued me a pass, and I climbed to the third floor, where the library occupies a large corner of the building.
I asked for the yearbook for Lisa Kim’s graduation year, the one for the previous year, and the one for the next year. I sat beside four girls who were chatting and doing homework at the same time. They kept looking at me as if they recognized me from somewhere. I suppose it was really because they didn’t recognize me, because I was an anomalous adult. I certainly felt out of place. I also felt a mixture of guilt and resentment. The guilt was because I had begun to conceal things from Lydia; she did not know that I was here, for instance, trying to find out something about Lisa Kim. Had she known, she would have shaken her head and rolled her eyes; she was treating me like a little boy and acting as if Lisa Kim were the wounded bird or mangy dog I’d brought home. That’s where the resentment came from. In truth, Lydia was not the only one. I’d been taking a good bit of shit and getting a good bit of gratuitous advice about the whole thing.
My gosh, Lisa Kim was a lovely girl.
LISA LOUISA KIM
“To try when there is little hope is to risk failure. Not to try at all is to guarantee it.” Anonymous. The unKorean. The antiKorean. Fire. Love to Mother Rosalie and the C’s. Thanks to Friedrich Nietzsche. Volleyball 1; SADD 1; Talent Show 2,3,4; Bye Bye Birdie 2, Little Shop of Horrors 3; Hedda Gabler 3; Oklahoma! 4; Death of a Salesman 4; Senior One-Acts 4.
I looked for Peter in all three books. Nothing. I read Lisa’s entry over again. Then I began to slowly read other entries. I found Annie Pritchard, who was also in Hedda Gabler, Oklahoma!, and the Senior One-Acts. Her entry included the designation “Water.” Fire; water. It took me a while to find Wind. She was Hannah “Sammy” Stone. She was not a theater kid, but she did thank Mama Rosalie and wrote, “Go C’s!” I could not find Earth. I went through each entry twice.
I decided to look for Peter in the other books. No luck, but in the earlier one I came across Rosalie Belcher, a senior when Lisa had been a junior who had been in the cast of both Bye Bye Birdie and Little Shop of Horrors. In addition, she called herself “C Earth Mother.”
“Lisa? What about Lisa?” I told her most of the story. I told her most of the truth.
“So who are you exactly?” I told her most of that, too. “I’m sorry, what exactly do you want?”
“There’s a guy named Peter Carey or Peter Cleary that Lisa went with.”
“I know Pete Carey. We worked together at John Barleycorn.”
“John Barleycorn?”
“He’s a bartender. I’m a waitress slash actor, just like Lisa.”
“Anyway, I have a letter Lisa wrote this guy, and I just want to get it to him.”
There was a long pause. “What kind of letter?”
“A personal one.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess you could send it to me. I guess I could get it to Peter.”
“You think you could?”
“I think I could. Let me give you my address. I’ll get it to him.”
“Okay, yeah,” I said, “that would be good. Or you could tell me where to find him and I could do it.”
“I think maybe I should do it. He knows me. He was pretty broken up.” She paused. “Lisa was sort of the love of his life.”
“Okay. Sure.”
I never sent it to her. I guess I didn’t want her to see what Lisa had written, to pass it around like a bag of chips. I mean, I wasn’t even sure they were friends at the end. Or maybe it was because I wanted to see Peter Carey myself.
I talked to a bartender, an assistant manager, and the manager at John Barleycorn. The manager said, “Sure, I remember Pete. Fact, someone just called me looking for a reference for him. Let’s see. I think it was Paddy Shea’s.”
Paddy Shea’s even smelled like an Irish pub. They must have brought the whole thing over. I sat at the end of the bar nursing a Guinness, reading the Sun-Times and watching Peter Carey move back and forth behind the bar. It was slow in the midafternoon, and he was washing glasses and restocking. He did not notice me watching, and I liked that about him. Still, he was not what I expected. He had an easy smile, an easy manner, and those sloe eyes romance novelists say that women like, but he was pigeon-toed, a bit soft in the middle, and his dark, wavy hair started up high on his forehead.
When he brought me a second pint, I said, “You’re Pete Carey, aren’t you?”
“Right,” he said.
“I met you once someplace. I’m a friend of Lisa Kim’s.”
“No shit. Man, too bad about ol’ Lisa.” It wasn’t the response I’d expected, but I went on.
“I guess you two were pretty close.”
“Not really.” He moved down the bar for a while.
When he came back, I said, “Listen, Pete, I have something that belongs to you.”
“Me?”
I explained briefly and put the letter on the bar. He didn’t even pick it up. He was drying a glass on his apron, and he read it quickly with a raised brow. “That can’t be for me, pal.”
“I think it is.”
“None of that stuff means anything to me. You know, she and I . . . we hung out a couple times last summer, but she was too much work. Sorry if you’re a friend or something. That was it. We didn’t have a love affair. We did the old Jimmy Buffett a time or two; that was all.” He moved down the bar again. I read the letter over, wondering if I could have misunderstood it. I finished my pint and left. I didn’t say good-bye.
For a few weeks I did nothing. As winter softened slightly and turned grudgingly toward spring, I pretended to have put the whole thing behind me in the hopes that people would stop treating me like a dotty aunt. In truth I was waiting to know what I should do next. In the beginning I’d been passive; I hadn’t done anything except go to the funeral. Everything else had come to me. Now I was becoming an active agent, if a cautious one. I folded Lisa’s letter and kept it in my hip pocket with my wallet, but I did not forget it. I was bothered by the fact that Annie Pritchard had misrepresented Peter Carey’s feelings for Lisa. Or he had. And I was bothered that she seemed reluctant to tell me how to find him. Why was that? And who the hell was the letter intended for, if not for Peter Carey? While I waited, I went about my life. I had classes to teach, papers to grade, tests to write. And then I had a relationship to work on. Lydia and I went out to dinner on Friday nights, shopped, cleaned and washed on Saturday, saw friends occasionally, took in a movie, watched TV, even tried to play Scrabble once or twice, but my heart wasn’t really in any of it. In reality I was becoming the worst things you can be in a relationship: distracted and indifferent. Or maybe I’d always been these things and she had, too, but now she wasn’t anymore.
One night I couldn’t sleep, so I got out of bed, made myself a mug of tea, and sat in the shadows of our bedroom on the easy chair where we threw our clothes and looked at Lydia sleeping in the moonlight, her slightly Roman nose, her full lips, her wild tangle of red hair. It was the hair that I’d first noticed about her. Actually, it had been pointed out to me across a party. “See that hair,” Tom MacMillan had said, “bet you her thatch is just like that.” My, we were young and foolish, but even then—even at twenty-two—Lydia had had a bearing, had carried herself just so (it was in the roll of her hips, the cock of her head, the way she threw her shoulders back) as if to say, “I don’t owe nobody nothing.”
And she didn’t, by the way. Lydia was the one person I knew at that age who had done virtually everything for herself if only by default, if only because her parents were such emotional cripples. When she was fourteen, Lydia started taking orders in a pizzeria and saving for college, even though when her father got wind of her plans, he told her, “Don’t expect me to help.” She didn’t. Without her parents even knowing it, she applied to a good private high school and got a scholarship. All through high school she worked thirty hours a week as a waitress in an IHOP. She got a full ride to Bennington, and when her parents expressed an interest in attending her graduation (they had never even seen the school), she asked them not to. She didn’t give them an explanation because she didn’t owe them one. That’s one of many things I learned from Lydia Greene. Never offer an excuse, even if you have a good one. When she called in sick, she never coughed or wheezed or made her voice sound weak or faint; she just said, “I’m taking a sick day and won’t be in today.” Back then Lydia was self-sufficient in every way I could see, and that’s what really made her attractive to me; she was maintenance free. Now she wasn’t anymore.
I got up and made myself another cup of tea. When I sat back down, Lydia had turned over and I could no longer see her face. I began to think about Lisa Kim, and I realized that I knew what to do next. In the morning I called her old high-school friend Annie Pritchard, who had wanted me to send her Lisa’s letter. I apologized for not having done so. “Been so busy, and I thought maybe I could hand it to you. Maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee or a beer or something.”
I did not show my photocopy of Annie Pritchard’s graduation picture to her; she would not have liked it. If she had ever been that pretty, she wasn’t anymore. If she hadn’t, the photographer had done her no favors; she could only look at it and remember what had never been.
We met in a bar near Lincoln Square. She was sitting at a cocktail table, her long legs crossed beneath, sipping a glass of white wine that I would discover later she had not paid for. She was tall and emaciated. Her arms were uniformly thin and without definition; you could probably touch thumb to finger around both her wrist and bicep. I sat across from her as she read the letter carefully and slowly. Then she put it in her purse and said, “They were very much in love. They were going to move in together. Lisa even said that they had talked about getting married, although that would have been so unLisa. I will see that Peter gets this. I think he’ll want it. Thank you.”
“He doesn’t want it,” I said. She looked up. “I saw him. He wasn’t in love with Lisa Kim.
They had a brief fling a while ago. So I’m just curious; why are you making this up?”
“I didn’t make it up,” she said without embarrassment. “Lisa did. It was for her family. You know, they’re so conservative. They wanted her to settle down, blah blah blah. She thought if she had a boyfriend, they might get off her back.”
“It seems like kind of an elaborate lie. I mean, how do you explain the letter? Did she plant it to be found? And would she want her mother reading stuff like this?”
Annie Pritchard took the letter back out and read it again. Her eyebrows went up her forehead, and she began to smile slightly. She tossed it on the table between us. “Peter,” she began slowly, “what do you really know about Lisa?”
“Very little, really.”
She put her fingertips together and looked above my head. A waitress took our order, and Annie Pritchard waited until she was gone. “Lisa Kim was brilliant. Lisa Kim was trouble. She was brilliant trouble. She was the most natural actor I’ve ever seen. She created the role of Lucy Fantisima in Gangbusters. That’s her masterpiece, and it’s all hers. Everyone who has played it since her has done nothing, nothing but imitate Lisa, even Mandy Mejias. They’re still imitating her on Broadway right now. Did you see the film? Same thing. Lisa should have had that part, but she was just too damn much trouble.” Annie Pritchard had a way of watching you for your reaction before you had one. It struck me as adolescent. “Trouble was, she never stopped acting. It was all a performance, and you could never say ‘scene.’ She wouldn’t stop. It drove you fucking nuts. She was the manic without the depressive. She was always on. She was like a drug; the first few minutes were exhilarating, but she got old fast.”