Retirement Projects

  Chapter 6

  Have you ever noticed that the call of a distant fire engine can be mistaken for the crowing of a rooster, at least if you hear it while you’re just waking up from a nap you didn't really need and the afternoon wind is pawing through the big pine tree outside the window? That’s just one of the things I learned after I had finished cleaning out Leilah's stuff, and before new factors entered my life that left me less time to lie around apostrophizing fire trucks.

  Sounds are a big part of solitude, I think. Although I gave up the search for nobody about the time I got really deeply involved with Leilah, in the next 25 years I spent a lot of time in places where there either was next to nobody, or there was a kind of loneliness despite the presence of other people. For example, I've heard the random bird chatter of the high desert at sunrise, which is a clinking and clattering like tableware in a crowded restaurant; and also the endless scarf of the wind pulled through poplar leaves, and behind that the stumbling of small waves on a rocky lakeshore for whole long afternoons. Not to mention the soft batter of shuffling soles, whispers, books closing or thudding back onto shelves, pages turning, pens scratching, 50 different chairs squeaking, and distant pigeons moaning that makes up the aural environment of the Reading Room in the British Museum.

  All these are fairly lonesome sounds, but at the same time both thrilling and soothing, partly because they are absolutely unlike anything humanity is capable of producing deliberately, and so are able to rescue us temporarily from the noisy but puny rapids of human striving. For plain old loneliness, however, none of them can match the splash of orange juice into a glass, on a sunny morning, in an apartment occupied only by yourself. Normally you would never bother to listen to that sound, because you know, without really thinking about it, that Jean or Joe or Jill, whoever it is that’s missing, will be home in a few hours or days or weeks at most, if in fact he/she isn’t just in the bathroom taking a shower, soon to reappear with one towel wrapped around her damp body and another one piled on her head to draw the moisture out of her hair, and a smile, ready to put her glasses on and join you for coffee.

  But once you're really alone, with no definite plans for ending that solitude, whole days stretching before you without real landmarks, the splash of the orange juice becomes psychologically deafening and will soon force you either to make some kind of contact with humanity, no matter how rudimentary, or else into the raiments of low-grade madness exhibited by the perennially lonely.

  Faced with this situation once the cleaning program was over, I adopted a sort of emergency modification of the Barbara Plan, trying first to cultivate the therapeutic stillness of a wounded animal, like the pigeon I saw flattened into the corner of a doorway on Market Street, waiting for healing or death, or the haggard blackbird I watched in Golden Gate Park, leaning motionless over a mud puddle while his companions briskly bathed. Or I tried to pretend I was a sparrow on a branch, waiting out an interminable, icy winter night. I don't think they know the sun will eventually rise, so what is the faith that keeps them from just opening their wrists, if they had wrists? Something. (Yes, I know: suddenly there seemed to be birds everywhere I looked.) I sat around reading books, watching rented movies while working my way through cold burritos, only making it to Safeway when I'd reached that final, glued segment on the last roll of toilet paper. Waiting for the healing process to commence. But nothing seemed to happen.

  Though I live in a building with four other apartments, I've never bothered to cultivate the other tenants – another failing that began to loom large in the wake of Leilah's abandonment. I have my reasons for this, some of which you will shortly hear, but I have to admit that it was mostly social laziness. The rest of the building was very quiet most of the time. I could often hear the footsteps and even the voices of the couple upstairs, along with lunatic yapping from the mid-sized canine who lived with the woman in the apartment below, and I would occasionally cross paths with people in the halls, say hello, maybe whine about the fog a little, but I never let things get any farther than that. The intermittent sounds of these people's lives therefore merely served to accentuate the silence of my own living space, once there was no one left in it to talk to, not even a cat.

  Birds may not have wrists, but I do, and after a while they were starting to look a little too tempting as I perched on my couch in front of the TV, waiting for the dawn that didn't seem to come. I tried increasing my stimulus level by walking the streets, becoming a restless observer of the city, as I was once advised to do by the professor in a history class I took during my sabbatical year instead of traveling to Japan or Zimbabwe the way you're supposed to. He told the class to stand at the railing above the Muni underground entrances at rush hour or at one of the corners of Union Square and note the behavior and flow patterns of all the people hustling off to their jobs, or wherever they were going. Or to hang around the chess players hunched over in their clouds of cigarette smoke at Powell and Market and observe their different styles of pushing the buttons on the time clocks – some nervous and aggressive, like the knock-kneed streetwise blackbirds that circled their feet, others leisurely as a tramp steamer, as if to say, you may need to conserve all your time, but I don't. And the Chinese men wearing tan windbreakers and baseball caps, the African-American players in dusty-looking suit jackets, the Hispanics denned up in their hooded sweatshirts to create a sort of privacy among the crowd of onlookers. Or I wandered the Civic Center farmer's market, with its piles of zucchini and corn being husked by old ladies determined not to buy an ear that had a single kernel out of place, while on the lawn nearby the homeless lounged and smoked, enjoying the brief San Francisco summer afternoon sunshine before the fog blew in again. Or, more frustratingly, the upscale strips of Union Street or Chestnut, with their throngs of prancing thoroughbred women with shopping bags, strips of tanned belly glowing and breasts bouncing.

  The restless observer thing had a certain intellectual interest for me, but like the distant noises in my building it tended to increase my feelings of isolation and rejection instead of relieving them. All these people had places they were going and things to do, even the red-faced maniac pacing along the line of tourists at the cable car turnaround and threatening them all with hellfire in an angry roar, Bible in hand and index finger holding his place in Leviticus. And in among them all was me, Mr. Estranged Husband, without anything you'd even call a real hobby, just standing around watching, or striding along as if I knew where I was going. I'd run into my students from 10 years ago and wonder how I must look to them, in my stained slouch hat and shlubby jeans and T-shirt frayed around the neckline – this faded and shrunken demigod who had wielded the power of life, death, and college admission over them all those years ago. And then I always had to go home, to my now pristine apartment, with its unencumbered, echoing walls and the orange juice container in the refrigerator.

  Luckily I finally remembered the knitting group.