The Great Spring

  “How?” I’m not going to let her comment pass.

  “In the way all writers are strange. I hope y’all aren’t writers.” We laugh.

  I persist. “How do you mean, ‘strange’?”

  “You know, standoffish. Keeps to himself.”

  “Is the town proud of him?”

  She hesitates. “No. Well, I guess, he’s done a lot for the town.” She tells us his siblings live nearby.

  “Is his family proud? What about his father?”

  “No, probably not,” she snaps out. Then, “I shouldn’t say that. His father was an old cowboy. He was really nice.”

  “Have you read any of his books?”

  “No, I’m not a reader.”

  “Did you like Last Picture Show when it came out?”

  “I didn’t much care for it. I waited to see the TV version, but Hud is my favorite.” She giggles. “That’s because of Paul Newman.”

  We walk to the main office of the bookstores, where a different young woman shows us a map of the buildings.

  I ask her if McMurtry is in town and she says no, he only comes around about once a month.

  Bill asks me, “Are you relieved?”

  I shrug. I seem to feel nervous even if he isn’t here. I bet I wouldn’t have been any better the second time.

  The young woman tells us the place almost closed a while ago, but Larry decided to keep it open and he’s still buying books.

  I tell her if she can find my books, I’ll sign them, and I give her some categories. Nothing is computerized. She goes off to search on the shelves.

  We cross the street again to the poetry and literature building. The books now are almost all rare or out of print. I hadn’t been aware of this the first time I visited. Hardcover of Lucky Life by Gerald Stern: $70.

  Bill and I are both writers—we automatically want to support a bookstore, but we like to handle books, mark them up. Rare books are a different category. We can’t find a book we want to spend so much for. I feel odd—and empty. Thousands and thousands of rare books in a vacant town.

  We go back across and the young woman says she can’t find any of my books.

  III

  We walk to the Dairy Queen, a half mile down, where McMurtry wrote Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.

  Bill rolls his eyes.

  “We don’t have to eat there,” I say.

  We pass a big brick house that’s much bigger and more formidable than anything else around. The house is dark, and clearly no one’s there. Some workers are putting up low sections of garden fence.

  I point. “This is McMurtry’s.” I know it from last time. The DQ is cheery and spacious, with booths lined against two walls.

  I tell Bill, “Choose your booth.”

  He picks the one in the corner. I tell him, “I bet this is where McMurtry sat.”

  I order a chocolate milkshake. “I never had one here before.” I smile at Bill, who scowls and tells me it will be terrible. He orders an Aquafina. I walk around and read plaques on the wall with framed covers of McMurtry’s books.

  “Well, someone at least recognizes him,” I say, approaching our booth.

  “Okay,” I say, opening my notebook. “One full hour. Tell your story of love. Go.”

  His head jerks up. “What?” And then he dives in and we both write like mad.

  But in the middle I want to stop. I’d written this all before. My story of love always leads to that one omnipresent woman.

  “. . . the kind of day winter is famous for—half-light and brown fields, but still almost warm-sweater weather, sun setting low to the horizon. My mother died two months ago. I refused to visit her in Florida last Thanksgiving, and I never saw her again but wheezing on her deathbed. I don’t have remorse. I tried so hard with her that my gums bled. I couldn’t get her to love me, but I didn’t give up. I wish I had. I was always trying a new angle, hoping to be free, to be able to say, Yes, dear mother, when she snapped at me. I thought I’d figure it out. . . .”

  An hour is a long time to write continuously. I watch the clock and veer off in my writing to name boyfriends and girlfriends and stay away from my maternal lineage.

  I didn’t have the opportunity to meet Larry McMurtry this time, but I was reminded how often writing brings down the disdain of your hometown. Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan’s hometown, didn’t understand why he had to move away, why he didn’t visit, and but for a few folks—his English teacher included—the people on the Iron Range hated his lyrics as well as his voice. Sauk Centre, Minnesota, disliked Sinclair Lewis after he wrote his first book, Main Street, which told the truth about small towns. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1930, Lewis died alone in Italy, some twenty years later, but he asked that his ashes be buried in Sauk Centre, where they disdained him. And I remembered how his beloved Oxford, Mississippi, called William Faulkner “Count No ’Count.”

  And here was McMurtry, planting books—rare books, no less—in a town that didn’t seem to care.

  I was driven to write books in order to find my lost voice, to be seen by people who could not see me. Why did I think books—something I cared for but they didn’t—would wake up my parents? They would read my books and we would have the connection I longed for. I thought they would see into my true heart. Here in Archer City, the scenario felt painfully graphic—the chasm of disconnection.

  It’s what I’ve come to understand: writing does not bring love—not the original love you want, at least. So many dreams we start out with as young writers. I thought I’d be invited to grand parties where pigs in blankets—something I saw in the fifties—would be served with doilies on silver trays. After all of these years I have seen ne’er a one of those miniature frankfurters.

  At this point, I’m sure McMurtry gathers books in his hometown because it gives him pleasure. Finally, there can be no other reason.

  I had come back to Archer City a second time so the young Natalie could catch up with the older Natalie. I didn’t come to Archer City to meet Larry McMurtry, like I thought. I came here to meet myself, to close the yawning gap, the chasm of hope and reality.

  “Wind down,” I tell Bill. The hour is up. I’m glad to put down my pen.

  Bill reads me aloud his brash, sad, sexy story of love. I tell him I’ll read mine on the long drive back.

  We pick our way to the car in the unlit dark, walking on the broken cracks and scattered grass along the road.

  8

  A Student Again

  I was on a yearlong sabbatical. My most recent—and, I thought, my best—book had almost broken me.

  Longing for that old feeling of lazy pleasure in the hand moving across the page, not sure what would come up, that old sweet experience of discovery, I talked two of my best writing friends into coming along to a writing workshop on the Oregon coast for six days. I wanted to be a young student again and set aside being the one in charge.

  On the first evening we were told to go back to where we were staying and produce two typed pages of risky, naked writing, with seventeen copies to pass around. The next day we held our breath as the work of half the class was analyzed, one by one, by two teachers. On Tuesday the other half would go under the microscope. The teachers had been students of Tom Spanbauer. Spanbauer, the author I actually came to study with, wasn’t in sight after our initial meeting the first night.

  It is widely acknowledged that writing cannot be taught as a chronological step-by-step method and that this workshopping process, which we were doing in class, is the way writing is transmitted in America. Many great writers have been initiated this way. But I grew impatient. I have assiduously avoided workshopping for the whole of my writing career.

  I repeatedly wriggled in my seat like a kindergartener. Where was Spanbauer? How did I get into this, anyway?

  But I knew the truth—I was seduced by attention. Tom Spanbauer, whom I admired, had written me a long letter, telling me how he loved my books. It was a lovely letter. Why didn’t I leave it at th
at? Instead of simply writing back, “Thank you; I like your work too,” I had to study with him.

  But in all honesty I did need help. I was tired of my writing subjects: my mother, my father, a sprinkle of my grandparents; my childhood in Farmingdale, New York; my old Zen teacher; Taos, New Mexico; Minnesota. A nice list, but thirty years of scraping around in it was enough. Of course, you should be able to write endlessly about a single topic, but I was sick of the particulars of my life.

  This writer in Oregon had heart and a wild sexual narrative. Originally from Idaho, Spanbauer had lived in a tent at the foot of Kilimanjaro in his twenties. His first question to me on the phone: Do you speak Swahili?

  This author’s second question—when our class met that first evening in the small elementary school used for summer adult art programs—was Has Zen taught you anything about dying?

  He’d gone around the room in a wool jacket with a white T-shirt underneath, shaking hands, greeting us. Here he was. I had traveled a long way. Maybe it was his nervousness in finally meeting—there’d been calls and e-mails for almost nine months—that produced the raw question blurted out so quickly, which resounded as the true inquiry, the real introduction.

  Squished into a third grader’s wooden desk, I stammered. Thirty years of ass-breaking meditation practice, and all I could say was, “I’ve seen some things.” Mysterious, very Zen-like, but what the hell did it mean? The author, who had AIDS, nodded.

  Exactly what things have you seen? I asked myself, walking back to my hotel that night, feeling outrageously foolish. What did I know about death? Often I walked a tightrope between the void and a desire for a good hamburger.

  No, Tom, I don’t know shit about dying. Can I get you a glass of water? Sit by your bed when you’re sick and keep you company? Give me your hand. Shall I tell you how your work moved me?

  At first I thought Tom’s novel The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was pure porn. I put it down. But men and women in the dot-com world in Palo Alto, where I was living for six months, talked about it constantly. I picked it up again months later while visiting my ninety-one-year-old mother in Florida. At midnight I climbed over the railing to the outdoor whirlpool of the senior center and took off my clothes. Normal hours were from eight in the morning till ten at night. My mother paid the fees all year-round and never went. I thought I’d use up a little of her time. I read Tom’s book by moonlight. On page 128 I looked up at the still palms standing tall around me, the milky black sky, and exclaimed aloud to the fat frogs, the square lit swimming pool and its ripply little waves, “I have never read anything like this.” On that night I swore I’d meet the man who wrote it.

  That was spring. Tom’s phone was unlisted. I could not reach him.

  The following fall I was on a book tour and read in Portland at one of the bastions of the word: Powell’s. It was a good audience. In the back stood an old student of mine, whom I was happy to see. When his turn came for me to sign his book and we’d caught up on a few life details, I leaned close and asked, “Do you know Tom Spanbauer? He lives around here.”

  I still remember the look of surprise on Steve’s face. His glasses fell lower on his nose.

  “I teach with him,” he said.

  When I arrived home, I shuffled through a pile of bills and advertisements. I’d been on the road for a month and I was tired. A blue-inked envelope caught my attention. Above the return address: Tom Spanbauer.

  I sat down in my living room and ripped it open. Seven pages, handwritten, torn from a spiral notebook. I didn’t trust anyone after this tour. My fans didn’t want to go where I was going with this new book. I read Tom’s words quickly, nervously.

  I glanced through my living room’s back window. The Russian olives had dropped all of their leaves. Here was an author I admired who admired me. Believing in ourselves is such a fragile thing. I started his letter again:

  Dainin Katagiri Roshi.

  You are so blessed to have loved so well.

  He was a beautiful man.

  Even more beautiful now that I have finished The Great Failure. In fact, I probably would not have loved your teacher at all had he not failed so predictably.

  Why hadn’t I just visited him in Portland, gone to a café and hung out? What was I looking for? I had to go to Cannon Beach and drag my friends Rob and Eddie along?

  Rob called me in Santa Fe before we went to Oregon. “Let’s stay a week extra and do our own writing retreat, hammer out eight or nine hours a day.” Eddie wasn’t enthusiastic about the second week. Too much work. He likes good times, and I assured him we’d have tons of fun. Rob found the hotel and registered us in the class.

  The ocean in Oregon was freezing. Rob vowed to dive into it at 5:00 P.M. every day.

  On the first day of the class, Eddie and I trailed after, wearing our suits, slinging our towels around our necks, but only going up to our ankles. We decided we’d come as lifeguards.

  Eddie turned to me. “Listen. If Rob is drowning, we’ll do rock, paper, scissors to see who goes in to save him. If we don’t like the results, we can do best out of five.”

  That sent me over the edge. We couldn’t stop laughing, our bodies heaving up and down.

  Rob appeared, sopping wet and shivering. “It was even colder than I thought.”

  “Don’t worry. If anything had happened, we were right here,” Eddie said, and we started that insane laughter again.

  My problem in the class was that they didn’t say, “This is good”; “This is bad.” Each piece had to have a diagnosis. Sometimes it took more than three-quarters of an hour for us to go over two pages of writing.

  I glanced up at the alphabet lining the top of the blackboard. Small s; capital S. Small h; capital H. I found the i and the t. Shit. I was hoping to come to Oregon to become a race car driver, a fisherwoman out to sea, to catch a big one, to find a whole new perspective. Not diddle around with everyone’s writing.

  The teachers did say something terrific that initial morning: “Don’t write about what you know, write about what you don’t know.”

  By the end of the first day, Eddie hadn’t said one word or offered one thought in class. If someone didn’t know him, he would look like he had zoned out. But that’s his cover. He watches closely. I challenged him Monday night. “From now on, you have to offer no fewer than five insights in every class.”

  “No more than five, either,” he said, smiling.

  On the second day, Eddie said to the writer of a piece we were looking at, “While you know what the story is about, at the same time you may not know everything. Some parts may be in you but not in your consciousness. So your grip on the story has to be loose. Sure, but loose.” I flashed him one finger.

  He flashed back four—how many more he had to go.

  During the break, the writer came up to him. “Did your hand signals with Natalie mean anything about my story?”

  More than our writing was laid out on the elementary school desks. Our whole self-worth was being examined. Writers were an earnest lot. It was painful to watch, painful to experience.

  That afternoon, Rob madly wrote notes to himself, then to me, shoving the pages across the desktop. “I didn’t sleep well last night until about four. Weird dream about school and me teaching the kids who were out of control. I hardly ever have those dreams anymore. Must be these desks we’re in and having to pee in the kids’ bathroom.”

  “Let’s have Cheerios tomorrow for breakfast,” I wrote back.

  By the end of the second long, eight-hour day, a creeping loneliness enveloped me as I tried to listen to the endless discussions of each person’s work. Restlessness, the struggle against what hurts, raged inside as I sat squished in that small chair attached to my desk. I didn’t belong in this class. A thought was slowly dawning on me: I wasn’t going to make it through the week.

  One student, sitting in the rear of the room, wore a black T-shirt, had dyed black hair, a lip ring, a nose ring, and a pale flat face. He was twent
y-three. He never spoke except to say “I’m always wrong” and “I hate myself.” The two workshop leaders didn’t blink an eye. They probably knew him and it was his usual shtick.

  During a break, he leaned outside against the pole that held the basketball net. Grass grew through cracks on the court. I walked over. “You don’t really hate yourself?”

  He was startled. He thought an instant. “I guess I do.”

  “I don’t believe it. You drive every day two hours from Portland to come here and two hours home. It means you want something.”

  In late afternoon the group went to a bar and shared a pitcher of beer. I nursed a sparkling water and positioned myself in the booth next to the depressed young man. “What do you do in the city?”

  “I go to college.” He paused. “A small, private Christian school.”

  I almost spit out my drink. “You feel comfortable there?”

  “They all hate me.” He reached out for a napkin with his right arm. The inside had a tattoo that said VOMIT. DEATH was another, written in Sanskrit. “It’s a long story,” he said, with the smallest curve up at the corner of his lips.

  The piece he’d read in class that morning was about a mother’s death. The son mixed her ashes in Evening in Paris perfume, then rubbed them into her sexy dresses and gave them away to the Salvation Army.

  That evening Eddie and I charged into the freezing ocean over our heads. Rob panicked; what if we had heart attacks? I made a face at him, but he was serious.

  As we were toweling off, I told him and Eddie what had been building in me all day. “I’m quitting,” I said. “I’m not going back. I can’t stand it. I don’t belong. I’m done. I came to study with Spanbauer and he’s not showing.”

  Rob and Eddie were stunned, and then agreed. “You’re doing the right thing.” They envied me, but they couldn’t abandon the other students. We agreed that we would hang out at lunch breaks and in the evenings.

  But back at the hotel the next morning while my friends were in class, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt displaced, out of sorts in this resort town. I was on my own now to burn in hell.