How to Love America and
Leave It at the Same Time
Arrive in some town around three, having been on the road since seven, and cruise the main street, which is also Route Whatever-It-Is, and vote on the motel you want. The wife favors a discreet back-from-the-highway look, but not bungalows; the kids go for a pool (essential), color TV (optional), and Magic Fingers (fun). Vote with the majority, pull in, and walk to the office. Your legs unbend weirdly, after all that sitting behind the wheel. A sticker on the door says the place is run by “The Plummers,” so this is Mrs. Plummer behind the desk. Fifty-fivish, tight silver curls with traces of russet, face motherly but for the brightness of the lipstick and the sharpness of the sizing-up glance. In half a second she nails you: family man, no trouble. Sweet tough wise old scared Mrs. Plummer. Hand over your plastic credit card. Watch her give it the treatment: people used to roll their own cigarettes in machines with just that gesture. Accept the precious keys with their lozenge-shaped tags of plastic. Consider the career of motelkeeper, selling what shouldn’t be buyable—rest to the weary, bliss to the illicit, space to the living. Providing television and telephones to keep us in touch with the unreal worlds behind, ahead. Shelter, a strange old commodity.
Untie the bags from the roof of the car. Your legs still feel weird, moving. The kids have the routine down pat: in three minutes in and out of their room and into the pool. Follow at a middle-aged pace, taking care not to disarray the suitcase in removing the bathing suits. The wife looks great, momentarily naked, but she claims she has a headache, after all those miles.
Wait until the kids get bored with yelling and splashing. Then, beside the pool, soak in the sun. Listen to the town. You have never heard of the town before: this is important. Otherwise, there are expectations, and a plan. This is not to say the town need be small. America conceals immense things. Here are thousands of busy souls as untangent to you as individual rocks on the moon. Say the town is in California, on the dry side of the Sierras; though it could as well be in Iowa, or Kentucky, or Connecticut. Out of nowhere, here it has arrived. Listen. The wavelets in the pool lap the tile gutter. The rush of traffic along Route Whatever-It-Is doesn’t miss you; it sings, sighs, cruises, processes hurtling multitudes, passes like a river. Nearer by, car tires chew the gravel, creeping closer. Look. Two long-haired children in patched jeans, their clothes full of insignias, pale, scarcely older than your own children, emerge, with a reluctance somehow loving, from a crumpled green Volkswagen, and walk to the motel office. A far-off door slams. Retreating tires chew the gravel smaller and smaller. In the other direction, a laundry cart rattles. And beyond all this, enclosing it, like a transparent dome, an indecipherable murmur, like bees in the eaves or the continual excited liquid tremolo of newly hatched birds hidden in a tree trunk, waiting to be fed.
A siren sounds.
It sounds distant, then proximate, then distant again, and lower-pitched. This cry of emergency cuts through the afternoon like a crack in crystal. Disaster, here? An accident up the road, which might have been you, had you pressed on? A heart attack, high in the mountains? Relax. Let the lordly sun dry the drops of water on your chest. Imagine an old Californian, with parched white beard and a mountain goat’s unfriendly stare, his whole life from birth soaked in this altitude, this view, this locality until an hour ago unknown to you and after tomorrow never to be known again—imagine him dead, his life in a blood-blind moment wrenched from his chest like a root from a tummock. The thought, curiously, is no more disturbing than the chuckling rush of traffic, than the animal ripple of the kids having returned their bodies to the pool, than the remote distinct voice that now and then, for reasons of its own, monotonously recites numbers into a kind of megaphone, an amplification system. “Fifteen … twenty …” Something to do with the disaster? An air alert? The voice drones on, part of the peace. Further sirens bleat, a black police car and a square white truck with blue flashers smoothly rip by, between the motel and the Mexican restaurant across Route Whatever-It-Is.
Beyond the restaurant’s red tile roof lies a tawny valley; beyond it, a lesser range of mountains, gray, but gray multitudinously, with an infinity of shades—ash, graphite, cardboard, tomcat, lavender. Such beauty wants to make us weep. If we were crystal, we would shatter. The amplified
voice goes on, “Twenty … thirty …” The kids begin to squabble. You have had enough sun. Time to reconnoitre.
The wife says her headache is better but she will stay in the motel room, to give herself a shampoo. Walk, family man, with the kids, out from the parking lot and down the main street. The heat from the sidewalk swims across your shins. The high mountain sun gives a tinny thin coating of glory to the orange Rexall signs, the red tongues of the parking meters, the pink shorts of girls whose brown backs are delicately trussed by the strings of minimal halters, the rags of Army-surplus green being worn alike by overmuscled youths and squinting, bent geezers. They drift, these natives, in their element. Love them because they are here. There is no better reason for love. They squint through you. To acquire substance, enter a store and buy something. Discover that the town offers postcards of itself; it is self-conscious, commercial. It contains many sporting-goods stores, veritable armories in the war against the wilderness—fishing rods, ski poles, hunting slingshots, collapsible rafts, folding tents, backpack racks, freeze-dried fruits in aluminum wrap, fanciful feathered fishing flies in plastic capsules, tennis rackets, tennis shirts, tennis balls the colors of candy. Your boys are enchanted, your girls are bored. Purchase five postcards, some freeze-dried pears for tomorrow’s long drive through the desert, and exit. Out on the hot pavement, the little girl’s sandals flop. She has been begging for new ones every day. Her hair is still wet from the motel pool. Take her into a shoe store. Solemnly the salesman seats her, measures her foot size. Marvel at the way in which his hand deigns to touch this unknown child’s sticky bare foot. Alas, what he has in her size she does not like, and what she likes he does not have in her size. Express regret and leave. Crossing the dangerous thoroughfare, you take her hand, a touch more tender with her, having witnessed the tenderness of others. Across the street, in a little main square pared to insignificance by successive widenings of the highway, an old covered wagon instead of a statue stands. Think of those dead unknown—plodding flights of angels—who dared cross this land of inhuman grandeur without highways, without air conditioning, without even (a look underneath confirms) shock absorbers, jolting and rattling each inch, in order to arrive here and create this town, wherein this wagon has become a receptacle for (a look inside discovers) empty cans of Coors Beer, Diet Pepsi, and Mountain Dew.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
• • •
Or, alternatively, get into the car at the motel and drive around the back streets: a wooden church, a brick elementary school with basketball stanchions on a pond of asphalt, houses spaced and square-set and too clean-looking. There is something sterilizing about the high air here. The lawns look watered, like putting greens. They contrast vividly with spaces of unkempt parched hay. The houses out of their rectilinear, faintly glistening fronts strive to say something, a word you are anxious to hear, and would drive forever to hear finally. But the kids are bored, and beg to go “home.” Home is the motel.
The wife’s hair is springy and fragrant from her shampoo. The pool is deserted and looks chilly. Evening shadows have slid down from the mountain. The sun sets in the west, everywhere. The gray range to the east basks in light like an X-rayed bone. Where shall we eat? Discuss. The kids want a quick, clean, hamburgery place, with Formica tables and clear neutral windows giving on the stream of traffic that ties them securely to the future. You and the wife want something enclosed, with regional flavor and a liquor license. Perhaps the kids win, and you sit there looking out through the windows thinking, This is America, a hamburger kingdom, one cuisine, under God, indivisible, with pickles and potato chips for all. What you see through the clea
r windows looks blanched without sunglasses, which you have worn all day, assigning the landscape you were driving through an unnatural postcard brilliance: the blue sky dyed cobalt, the purple mesas and ochre rocks tinted as if by the pastel artist who timidly sells bad portraits at a country fair.
Or perhaps you talk the kids into the Mexican restaurant, and as they sit in candlelight struggling with their tacos and enchiladas you sip your salt-rimmed margarita and think, This is America, where we take everything in, tacos and chow mein and pizza and sauerkraut, because we are only what we eat, we are whatever we say we are. When a Japanese says “Japanese,” he is trapped on a little definite racial fact, whereas when we say “American” it is not a fact, it is an act, of faith, a matter of lines on a map and words on paper, an outline it will take generations and centuries more to fill in. And, yes, the waitress bringing the sherbet and the check appears to illustrate these meditations, for she is lovely and young and deracinated, one of the no-name breed our coast-to-coast experiment has engendered, her bones grown straight on cheap food, her fertility encased in the chemical Saniwrap of the Pill, her accent pleasantly presupposing nothing, her skin tanned dark as an Indian’s but her eyes blue and her hair sun-blond and loose down her back in Eve’s timeless fall.
Be careful crossing the highway. In the motel parking lot, before you can reach the anonymity of your room, Mrs. Plummer, hustling from her car to the office clutching papers in her hand, has to cross your path, and smiles. This slightly spoils it. She knows you. You know her. When innocence ends, plans must be made. First, sleep. Then, early in the morning, when the traffic is spotty and the sun is feeble in the east, move on.
The Music School
My name is Alfred Schweigen and I exist in time. Last night I heard a young priest tell of a change in his Church’s attitude toward the Eucharistic wafer. For generations nuns and priests, but especially (the young man said) nuns, have taught Catholic children that the wafer must be held in the mouth and allowed to melt; that to touch it with the teeth would be (and this was never doctrine, but merely a nuance of instruction) in some manner blasphemous. Now, amid the flowering of fresh and bold ideas with which the Church, like a tundra thawing, responded to that unexpected sun the late Pope John, there has sprung up the thought that Christ did not say Take and melt this in your mouth but Take and eat. The word is eat, and to dissolve the word is to dilute the transubstantiated metaphor of physical nourishment. This demiquaver of theology crystallizes with a beautiful simplicity in the material world; the bakeries supplying the Mass have been instructed to unlearn the science of a dough translucent to the tongue and to prepare a thicker, tougher wafer—a host, in fact, so substantial it must be chewed to be swallowed.
This morning I read in the newspaper that an acquaintance of mine had been murdered. The father of five children, he had been sitting at the dinner table with them, a week after Thanksgiving. A single bullet entered the window and pierced his temple; he fell to the floor and died there in minutes, at the feet of his children. My acquaintance with him was slight. He has become the only victim of murder I have known, and for such a role anyone seems drastically miscast, though in the end each life wears its events with a geological inevitability. It is impossible, today, to imagine him alive. He was a computer expert, a soft-voiced, broad-set man from Nebraska, whose intelligence, concerned as it was with matters so arcane to me, had a generous quality of reserve, and gave him, in my apprehension of him, the dignity of an iceberg, which floats so serenely on its hidden mass. We met (I think only twice) in the home of a mutual friend, a professional colleague of his who is my neighbor. We spoke, as people do whose fields of knowledge are miles apart, of matters where all men are ignorant—of politics, children, and, perhaps, religion. I have the impression, at any rate, that he, as is often the case with scientists and Midwesterners, had no use for religion, and I saw in him a typical specimen of the new human species that thrives around scientific centers, in an environment of discussion groups, outdoor exercise, and cheerful husbandry. Like those vanished gentlemen whose sexual energy was exclusively spent in brothels, these men confine their cleverness to their work, which, being in one way or another for the government, is usually secret. With their sufficient incomes, large families, Volkswagen buses, hi-fi phonographs, half-remodelled Victorian homes, and harassed, ironical wives, they seem to have solved, or dismissed, the paradox of being a thinking animal and, devoid of guilt, apparently participate not in this century but in the next. If I remember him with individual clarity, it is because once I intended to write a novel about a computer programmer, and I asked him questions, which he answered agreeably. More agreeably still, he offered to show me around his laboratories any time I cared to make the hour’s trip to where they were. I never wrote the novel—the moment in my life it was meant to crystallize dissolved too quickly—and I never took the trip. Indeed, I don’t believe I thought of my friend once in the year between our last encounter and this morning, when my wife at breakfast put the paper before me and asked, “Don’t we know him?” His pleasant face with its eyes set wide like the eyes of a bear gazed from the front page. I read that he had been murdered.
I do not understand the connection between last night and this morning, though there seems to be one. I am trying to locate it this afternoon, while sitting in a music school, waiting for my daughter to finish her piano lesson. I perceive in the two incidents a common element of nourishment, of eating transfigured by a strange irruption, and there is a parallel movement, a flight immaculately direct and elegant, from an immaterial phenomenon (an exegetical nicety, a maniac hatred) to a material one (a bulky wafer, a bullet in the temple). About the murder I feel certain, from my knowledge of the victim, that his offense was blameless, something for which he could not have felt guilt or shame. When I try to picture it, I see only numbers and Greek letters, and conclude that from my distance I have witnessed an almost unprecedented crime, a crime of unalloyed scientific passion. And there is this to add: the young priest plays a twelve-string guitar, smokes mentholated cigarettes, and seemed unembarrassed to find himself sitting socially in a circle of Protestants and nonbelievers—like my late computer friend, a man of the future.
But let me describe the music school. I love it here. It is the basement of a huge Baptist church. Golden collection plates rest on the table beside me. Girls in their first blush of adolescence, carrying fawn-colored flute cases and pallid folders of music, shuffle by me; their awkwardness is lovely, like the stance of a bather testing the sea. Boys and mothers arrive and leave. From all directions sounds—of pianos, oboes, clarinets—arrive like hints of another world, a world where angels fumble, pause, and begin again. Listening, I remember what learning music is like, how impossibly difficult and complex seem the first fingerings, the first decipherings of that unique language which freights each note with a double meaning of position and duration, a language as finicking as Latin, as laconic as Hebrew, as surprising to the eye as Arabic or Chinese. How mysterious appears that calligraphy of parallel spaces, swirling clefs, superscribed ties, subscribed decrescendos, dots and sharps and flats! How great looms the gap between the first gropings of vision and the first stammerings of sound! Vision, timidly, becomes percussion, percussion becomes music, music becomes emotion, emotion becomes—vision. Few of us have the heart to follow this circle to its end. I took lessons for years, and never learned, and last night, watching the priest’s fingers confidently prance on the neck of his guitar, I was envious and incredulous. My daughter is just beginning the piano. These are her first lessons, she is eight, she is eager and hopeful. Silently she sits beside me as we drive the nine miles to the town where the lessons are given; silently she sits beside me, in the dark, as we drive home. Unlike her, she does not beg for a reward of candy or a Coke, as if the lesson itself has been a meal. She only remarks—speaking dully, in a reflex of greed she has outgrown—that the store windows are decorated for Christmas already. I love taking her, I love waiting for
her, I love driving her home through the mystery of darkness toward the certainty of supper. I do this taking and driving because today my wife visits her psychiatrist. She visits a psychiatrist because I am unfaithful to her. I do not understand the connection, but there seems to be one.
In the novel I never wrote, I wanted the hero to be a computer programmer because it was the most poetic and romantic occupation I could think of, and my hero had to be extremely romantic and delicate, for he was to die of adultery. Die, I mean, of knowing it was possible; the possibility crushed him. I conceived of him, whose professional life was spent in the sanctum of the night (when, I was told, the computers, too valuable to be unemployed by industry during the day, are free, as it were, to frolic), devising idioms whereby problems might be fed to the machines and emerge, under binary percussion, as the music of truth—I conceived of him as being too fine, translucent, and scrupulous to live in our coarse age. He was to be, if the metaphor is biological, an evolutionary abortion, a mammalian mutation crushed underfoot by dinosaurs, and, if the metaphor is mathematical, a hypothetical ultimate, one digit beyond the last real number. The title of the book was to be N + 1. Its first sentence went, As Echo passed overhead, he stroked Maggy Johns’ side through her big-flowered dress. Echo is the artificial star, the first, a marvel; as the couples at a lawn party look upward at it, these two caress one another. She takes his free hand, lifts it to her lips, warmly breathes on, kisses, his knuckles. His halted body seemed to catch up in itself the immense slow revolution of the earth, and the firm little white star, newly placed in space, calmly made its way through the older points of light, which looked shredded and faint in comparison. From this hushed moment under the ominous sky of technological miracle, the plot was to develop more or less downhill, into a case of love, guilt, and nervous breakdown, with physiological complications (I had to do some research here) that would kill the hero as quietly as a mistake is erased from a blackboard. There was to be the hero, his wife, his love, and his doctor. In the end the wife married the doctor, and Maggy Johns would calmly continue her way through the comparatively faint … Stop me.