Tapestry of Fortunes

  “Okay. Let’s both answer on three. One … two …”

  On three, we both said, “Naaaah.”

  “Not that I don’t love you,” Brice said, quickly.

  “Or I you.”

  “But …” he said.

  “But,” I agreed.

  He got up and stood looking out onto the street for a while, his hands on his hips like a quarterback. Then he turned and said, “Well.”

  “Take care of yourself, B,” I said, and I watched him walk back to his house—their house—his head hung low.

  A moving van pulled away from that house two weeks later, and a week after that another moving van pulled up to it. A young family lives next door now, very nice, two little boys, six and eight. They’re wonderful children, polite and charming and oftentimes funny, but for me the whole family is like being offered a sumptuous dinner when you’ve no appetite at all.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking I need to move, too. When? I ask myself sometimes, and I answer in the same way I answered Penny: something will tell me when.

  Well, maybe that has just happened: maybe something is telling me that now is the time. Getting off the plane on my way home from making the speech in Atlanta, I have one of those moments that feels like life backing up to you without the warning beeps, and then hitting you smack in the middle of your chest. I realize what it is: I don’t want to go home. Not to that house, not to that street. The thought of pulling into the driveway, sliding the key into the lock, offers not the comfort of familiarity but the ache of abandonment.

  On the plane, I sat next to a man with whom I had a great deal in common. We both liked anchovies and we were born in the same month in the same year. We liked Little League baseball, we loved dogs but traveled too much to have one. Our hair was the same salt-and-pepper color. The most salient thing we had in common was that we both had jobs motivating people. But whereas I wrote self-help books and gave talks, he was a psychologist who flew around the country to various businesses, doing team building with employees. He enjoyed his work, and he had been remarkably successful. He told me that at one time he had owned four homes, including an apartment in Paris. Now, though, he was coming back from having done his last job. He was quitting the business, and he and his wife were going to live in the one place he had left—he’d sold all the others. They were going to live in a small cabin, located on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters.

  “Retiring, huh?” I said.

  He looked over at me. “I don’t call it that. I guess I don’t even think of it like that. I see where all this success has led me. Now I want to see what it’s kept me from.”

  “Huh,” I said. And then I asked him, “Are you at all scared?”

  He tossed some peanuts into his mouth, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Terrified.”

  We both laughed, but then he said, “I also haven’t felt this alive in years.”

  I sit in one of the empty gate areas to call a cab. When the dispatcher asks where I’m going and I give him my address, my gut begins to ache. Well, I’ve said it often enough to others: there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you’ll stay in a place you’ve outgrown.

  When I get out to the curb, the cab is there. The driver stashes my bag in the trunk, and I think he looks angry. Sure enough, as we pull away from the curb, he catches my eyes in the rearview and in an accent I can’t quite identify yells, “You know what? I’ll tell you something: People are rude!”

  “They certainly can be,” I say.

  “For one hour, I been waiting for a man who say he’s coming right out, that’s what he tell the starter, ‘No, I have no baggage; I am coming out now.’ One hour I wait, he doesn’t come. Then the starter tell me, ‘He went to baggage claim; he’s coming now.’

  “I say, ‘No.’ I say, ‘I’m not take him.’ Instead, I take you.”

  From the radio, I hear the faint strains of “September in the Rain.”

  “Is that Dinah Washington?” I ask, leaning forward.

  The man, whose name is Khaled, has settled down somewhat; he readjusts his shoulders and increases the volume slightly.

  “Yes, Dinah Washington, I have to listen to her because she make me calm down from the rude people.”

  I lean back in the seat, cross my arms, and stare out the window. “I wish there was a place where you could sit at a little table and still listen to songs like that,” I say. “You know. White tablecloth, little lamp lit low, Rob Roys and Brandy Alexanders.”

  “Those places are all gone, now.”

  “I know they are.”

  We fall silent until we pull up in front of my house. Then Khaled says, “I tell you what. You hire me and I drive you around and all we do, we listen to old songs. For many hours!”

  I laugh. “Don’t tempt me.”

  I bring my bags in, then collect the mail and start sorting through it. For one moment, I think about calling Khaled back. But I don’t. I hope it is not to my everlasting regret. I’m always telling everyone else to take advantage of spontaneous gifts that come along, often when you least expect them. In fact, that idea inspired one of my books, the one that emphasizes the worth of going out into the world and gathering up all the beautiful things that are given to you, if only you will ask.

  I am just about to toss all the mail in the trash when what I think is a postcard falls out of a circular. But it’s not a postcard. Rather, it’s an old black-and-white photograph made to serve as a postcard, of what looks to be Tahiti: there in the background is the endless sea, the rise of low mountains, wisps of clouds. In the foreground, off to the side, is a black-haired native woman with an unsettlingly direct gaze. I have never seen the image, yet it is familiar to me.

  On the back of the card, I see lines of black ink from a fountain pen, written in a clear, flowing hand that I recognize instantly. The message is brief, only three lines:

  I still think of you.

  How are you?

  Tell me.

  There is a return address, no name, but I don’t need one. From both the image and the handwriting, I know who sent this photo: Dennis Halsinger. He is an artist I once loved, who left Minnesota for Tahiti many years ago. His name is such a long story.

  Well. Speaking of everlasting regret.

  Once I was riding a bus, sitting behind two women who were maybe in their late fifties. They were engrossed in a conversation I couldn’t hear much of; they kept their voices low and decorous. But at one point, one of the women sighed and leaned her head against the bus window, and said, “Ah, you know. My one and only yous.”

  Her friend laughed. “It’s my one and only you.”

  The other woman said, “No it isn’t.”

  I think it’s true for a lot of people, that we have a few shining relationships in our lives, with people we hold forever in our hearts. It also seems, though, that there’s usually one who mattered most. For me, that was Dennis Halsinger. He was the one apart, the one I loved best, and truest, and the one I felt most loved by. I loved him for the way he was and for who I was when I was with him. He lived honestly, consciously, in ways both macro and micro, and I admired this. Morning, noon, middle of the night: when you looked into his eyes, the sign was flipped to the Open side. I could tell him anything, and did. We fit together in much the same easy way that Penny and I did. It was rare enough for me to have that ease and joy and depth in a friendship with a woman; to have the same level of comfort with a man was something I had never experienced before, nor have I since. Even in my most successful relationships after Dennis, there was only so far I could go. Or would go, perhaps.

  When Dennis and I were both still in our early twenties, he left, he went off on a voyage to South America, and later to Tahiti, to live. We’d planned on my joining him there. But in the end I lacked the courage to break away like that. It had all seemed so easy when I agreed to it, but then there was the matter of getting the money for the plane ticket, of deciding wha
t to take and what not to. Would they have Herbal Essences shampoo there? Good movies and record stores? What if I got appendicitis? Would I in fact miss the country I spent so much time maligning? In the end, I decided to pass on the idea. For the moment! I told myself. I believed, in youth’s way, that such opportunities would always be there. Such men, too, I suppose.

  Anyway, gradually, Dennis and I lost touch. And then we died, is how I now realize I thought of it. Or maybe it was just a part of me that died, when I didn’t go with him.

  But now. Here he is, on a card in my hand. Dennis Halsinger!

  I don’t even bother to change out of my suit. I go directly to the little desk in the bedroom and take out stationery. Images of Dennis from the time we were together are tumbling around in my brain, falling over themselves for prime placement: his long blond hair, his face so handsomely chiseled I used to tell him he should model for Prince Valiant in the comics. I see us walking in a field with chest-high grass that moved in the wind like water, and where the birdsong was so loud it made us laugh—we had to shout to be heard above it. I remember us driving down the freeway on a hot August night, looking for a place far from city lights where we could lie down and look at the stars, and the place we found presented constellations to us with a clarity that rendered us speechless.

  Dennis used to give books to me, battered paperbacks he had read and reread into buttery softness: Siddhartha, The Magic Mountain, Fear and Trembling. He said I’d learn more from them than from my psychology textbooks, and he was right. He gave me the I Ching, the edition with the foreword by Carl Jung, and we did our fist toss using pennies on the sidewalk in front of his house.

  In addition to photography, Dennis did painting and sculpture, and I remember him up on a ladder barefoot and shirtless, his jeans barely hanging on to his slim hips, welding something onto a high, free-form tower he had made—he did at least wear a welder’s mask. I remember his hand guiding mine as he showed me how to draw a peony as big as a dinner plate. Feeding me the seeds of a pomegranate, one by one. The time we jumped in the Mississippi to go swimming and, afterward, came back to my place to dry off. We sat at the tiny kitchen table wrapped in towels and then he stood and dropped his towel and said, “This is the way I was born.” I stood and my towel dropped, too, and I went to him and he carried me to my bed. That was my first time; he was the first, and I’ve always been glad of that.

  I begin writing:

  Dear Dennis,

  A few months ago, I started a letter to you. But there was too much to say. It was a time when I had just lost my best friend, and I was casting about for what to do with myself, needing to remember that life is mostly rich and beautiful and ever there for the taking. And if there was anyone who could remind me of that, it was you. But I wrote a few lines, and stopped.

  Then, today, I got your postcard. And your photograph, wonderful as always.

  Dennis used to take photos of ordinary people, beautiful images that you wanted to stare and stare at, that your eye roved over and kept finding things in. He took pictures in a casual, off-the-cuff kind of way, and I never understood how he was able to find the precise moment to snap the shutter. By showing a half smile, a finger to the corner of the eye, an unbandaged cut on a hand, he could reveal so much about a person. Sometimes it wasn’t the people themselves; it was their houses, or their cars, or their four dogs. It was random things that belonged to them—a tin of buttons. Brass knuckles in a bedside drawer. A cookbook open to a page with so many stains it looked like a Rorschach test.

  Looking at Dennis’s photos showed me that photography was not only visual record keeping but a legitimate form of art. Not only did I see that a person’s soul could be captured (the Native Americans were right to fear the lens), but I saw how shadow and light affect the image. And I saw what Dennis meant when he said that photography is a process of elimination.

  He once showed me a collection of photographs he’d taken of waitresses when he drove his motorcycle from Minnesota to California. You could see all the different uniforms, the white shoes, the variety of earrings, one lovely locket on a long chain. I remember a shot where a waitress had six plates lined up on her arm, while another sat in a booth, on break, looking out the window. Her legs were crossed, and her arms were wrapped tightly around herself. She had a plateful of food before her, but she stared out at the rain.

  Dennis photographed waitresses with hair fashioned into falling-down ponytails or sprayed-up beehives or neat little short dos, some of which were festooned with bows or barrettes; it’s astonishing to me how clearly I recall those images, now. You could see such weariness in the set of shoulders. You could see blatant invitation in the thrusting forward of breasts. You could see a handkerchief pinned above a pocket, an emphatic smear of eye shadow, a run in a nylon, a thin arm that reached for a pile of coins left beneath a tabletop jukebox.

  I write:

  I have books of photography by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, because their work reminds me of you. One of Evans’s images I’ve been looking at lately is of a grave situated at the edge of a field that stretches far out, row after row of tilled earth, five telephone poles running alongside. And it was the telephone wires that got me. Life going on above, chatter along the lines; below … who knew?

  I had an abstract fear of death when I was young. These days, it is not so abstract, but then it is not so much a fear anymore, either. You used to say, “When it’s time to come in, it’s time to come in, that’s all.” And I remember you quite naturally subscribed to the idea of communication after death, something I have never believed in more than now.

  You ask how I am. Well enough, is the short answer. The world is more complex than I once believed; people are, too. I write books that I hope will help people with various problems in their lives, and I give a lot of talks all over the country, and occasionally abroad. Hearing from you has made me realize something: oftentimes, when I give talks, I’m sharing knowledge I gained from being with you. And I’m trying to motivate people in the same way that you tried to motivate me: to be awake, to stay true, to evolve. The friend I just lost was like you in that way, too: you would have liked each other, I think.

  Are you married? I’m not. Whether you are or not, I am excited at the prospect of having you, however tangentially, in my life again.

  Why are you in Cleveland? Now that you are closer, I’d like to come and visit you there. Or perhaps you would like to come here?

  Dennis Halsinger. I think it is not much of an exaggeration to say that I remember everything.

  Yours,

  Cece

  I add a P.S. with my cellphone number, then put the pen down and stare at the letter. What can this mean, this great excitement, this overwhelming desire to see him? I suppose that for one thing, it means I need someone I can talk to, talk to really. This is the first time since Penny died that I’ve wanted to. “Okay, Penny,” I say. “When is now. I’m going to make a move.”

  It’s about time.

  “I wish you’d known him,” I tell her.

  Oh I know him, now.

  LAST SEPTEMBER, BEFORE PENNY WAS DIAGNOSED, THERE WAS an unseasonably cold Sunday near the end of the month. Snow was predicted, though it never came. Penny and I were sitting out on her front porch under electric blankets, leafing through our respective backlogs of magazines. “You know what you are?” she said.

  “What?” I asked, barely looking up from my magazine.

  “A flaming hypocrite.”

  Now I did look up. “Flaming, huh?”

  “Yes.” She flipped a couple pages of her magazine. Angrily, I thought.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked.

  She looked over at me. “My problem is that you tell other people how to do things you yourself need to do, and don’t. You write books for other people full of advice that you never follow.”

  “Now, now. You know what they say in couples therapy about the use of always and never.”

  “Yeah, wel
l, we’re not a couple. We’re best friends. Supposedly.”

  I sighed. “Okay. You want to talk again about how we need to travel somewhere together?”

  “No. I want to talk about how you say you want to simplify your life, how you want to downsize, and clarify what’s important, and do what you really need to do, and then you … don’t.”

  I sat there for a moment, then said, “Is this about the bamboo sheets I just ordered?” There’d been an 800 number in one of the magazines.

  Nothing.

  “I wanted those sheets. They’re really beautiful and they feel—”

  “You have bamboo sheets.”

  “Not in light green. I have them in white and light blue.”

  “How many do you need?”

  “Listen, Penny, I work hard. As you know. I like nice things. I can afford nice things. And so I buy them. Okay? I like to own nice things.”

  “They own you. You don’t stop working so much because you have to keep making money to pay for things you buy that you do not need.”

  I looked at her. Licked my lips and pushed my hair back off my shoulders. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Ask.”

  “Do you need everything you’ve got?”

  “No. No! And that’s why I’m getting rid of it! You just helped me fill up all those bags of clothes to give away. And I’ve brought nearly all the stuff I had in the attic to Goodwill.”

  “Where, next time we go, you’ll buy it all back,” I said.

  “No, I won’t. In case you haven’t noticed, Miss Perceptive, I have not been buying much of anything but groceries.”

  “Well, good for you. Why don’t you get rid of everything you don’t need?”

  “I will. That’s my goal. I don’t want these … things anymore. They’re an unnecessary complication. A hindrance.”

  “You know what? You’re the hypocrite, Penny. You will never give away all the stuff you don’t need! Look at all the kitchen toys you have. I never saw anyone with more kitchen toys than you, and you hardly ever even cook! Why don’t you give away one of your precious Microplanes? You have three different sizes!”