Cindy brushed nonexistent crumbs from her smock. “I have a confession to make,” she said, sounding furtive. “Yes, I’m very, very interested in a screenplay collaboration. I’m hoping we can at least exchange contact information. I’d like to see us go forward with a dialogue. It’s not completely a harebrained plan. But the fact of the matter is that talking about John William has, until now, been an obstacle for me. I’ve had a terrible resistance to talking about him. What’s interesting to my therapist is this constant resistance. He—”
She was crying, so I went for napkins.
4
COUNTRYMAN—GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
ALMOST ALL OF MY STUDENTS noticed me in the papers. Mainly, they celebrated my dark-horse celebrity, treated me as if I’d won the state lottery, or commented critically on my annual photo, but in Nature in Literature, an elective for students who view themselves as college-bound, someone asked if John William was like Thoreau, probably because we’d read Walden together, and I answered that I didn’t think we could put Thoreau above Dickinson when it comes to hermitry. There were, after all, Thoreau’s visitors at Walden and his excursions to Concord for meals with his mother, whereas Dickinson, I told my class, was truly hermitic, and didn’t leave the grounds of her family’s estate for a quarter-century. As it turned out, one of my students had written on Dickinson in American Studies the previous semester, and told us that the Belle of Amherst, unwilling to leave the second floor of her house for about seven years, had been known to lower, from her bedroom window, baskets of gingerbread, tied to a rope, into the arms of neighborhood children, but this didn’t mean she was a hermit by choice, only that, most probably, she suffered from an anxiety disorder called agoraphobia, or fear of public places. Which came first, I wanted privately to know, the mental chaos or the retiring?
AFTER TOURING EUROPE, I flew home with Jamie Shaw’s phone number not only in my wallet but in one of my journals, too. I was keeping them apart, in case I lost one. In my bedroom, I emptied my pack onto the rug—the dirty laundry, the camping gear from San Sebastián, the cold-weather gear from San Vigilio, the used boots from Innsbruck—and already these things looked archival. I started the laundry and put the gear in the basement. With my French tailoring scissors, I trimmed my beard as closely as I could and shaved the rest, cleaning up afterward with a broom and a vacuum, and then I lay down and read passages in my journals until my father came home. He said he’d fallen off some scaffolding in July, and that this misstep had slowed him, and then, in the kitchen, we talked about my trip—all of it but Jamie—while eating egg sandwiches. My father said that Carol had a new apartment but still worked at Bar Mart, a restaurant-supply company, and that my cousin Keith, it had come to light that summer, was diabetic, and had to sit down on the job sometimes to eat a pan of brownies. I asked if there were phone messages or mail for me, and my father produced a folder on which he’d written my name. Patiently, he ate Fritos from the bag while I looked at my messages. No one had called from Portland.
After washing the dishes, we settled into Hawaii Five-O. This is how it was before I left—the widower in the evening with his only son, lights off, television on. When he fell asleep in his chair, I looked at my mail, which included a bank statement indicating a depleted account, my college schedule and tuition bill, and a postcard showing a logging truck hauling a single enormous log toward a mill. On the back, in inelegant capitals, it read:
COUNTRYMAN—
AT BADEN-BADEN THROUGH 9/4 THEN GOIN’
TO GIT EJUKATID.
GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
BLOOD,
SIMON MAGUS
I went to the bookshelf and looked up Baden-Baden in the ’64 World Book Encyclopedia my mother had worn down my father about buying, because, worldly as I was after my turn on the Continent, I didn’t know about those famous German thermal baths. I also looked up Simon Magus, but there was no entry for anyone by that name. COUNTRYMAN—GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Too late literally, as in a date on a calendar, or too late in some deeper, more ambiguous fashion? COUNTRYMAN—GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE: I saw it as a directive and a warning both, urgent, dramatic, ambiguous, comic, friendly, condescending, and grave. I see now that I parsed it incorrectly by deciding to focus on its possible humor, by deciphering it as a parody of something I couldn’t put my finger on. I also read it, or misread it, as a fresh call to danger in the woods. I thought he was saying we ought to get lost again. I thought I was invited to punish myself in hidden places for the pleasure of it one more time. I thought he wanted to get me killed amid great exhiliration. But, as I said, I was wrong in translating John William’s note, missing my friend’s tone and misconstruing his content. COUNTRYMAN—GET OUT HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE: part of its presumption, if you didn’t read in humor, was its dismissal of my summer—though “Baden-Baden,” I should have understood, paid it oblique homage—or its dismissal of me, more broadly speaking, as if everything I did, or was doing, or would do was in the way of something under John William’s auspices that mattered more.
Around midnight, when my father went to bed, I called Jamie. I said I was sorry to call her so late, and she answered, “I’m a night owl.” I said I didn’t have a reason for calling other than curiosity about Erin, and Jamie said that Erin had quit school and was getting treatment from a psychiatrist in Pocatello, adding, “My dad doesn’t want to pay for it, but my mom does,” and then immediately asking if I’d read The Bell Jar. I remember feeling grateful to Jamie for directing our conversation onto open ground, where the point of a topic was its discussion. So that was a long phone call. We talked like friends, easily, although I’d gotten to the point, after parting with her in Rome, where I felt sick to my stomach about Jamie. Near the end of our conversation she said, “Hey, if you’re ever coming through Portland, check in with me.” I said I would call in that circumstance, and I did call, thirty-six hours later, and said I was coming through in a few days, but I lied, of course, because I wasn’t coming through, Portland was where I was going.
THE DAY AFTER I flew home from Europe, I went to the Barry house on East Laurelhurst Drive; my idea being to requisition some scotch, vodka, or bourbon from the Cornucopia II in preparation for an afternoon with some Countrymen cousins. Instead, I found John William’s father, after jogging down a flagstoned side path, and having rung the front doorbell and getting what the burglar hopes for: no answer. It was a late-summer Saturday, and he was on his patio, not far from the lake, in view of his sloop, reading a newspaper in shorts, a polo shirt, white socks, and deck shoes. Under the shade of a tilted umbrella, on a wrought-iron chaise longue with wheels and cushions, Mr. Barry wore black plastic glasses. Over the years, this style of glasses—Buddy Holly’s style—has waxed and waned, but mostly they’ve functioned as a comic prop or as a prosthetic for the elderly urbane, sometimes appearing on the faces of mods or dissonantly on generals hauled before the press. But what I want to say is that, on his patio, reading in the breeze from off Lake Washington and before he became aware of me, Mr. Barry didn’t look tranquil. In this naturally tranquil scene, behind the house in Laurelhurst, with lake water lapping, beside the backyard lawn and the brick walkway in a herringbone pattern, by the planting beds in late summer, not far from the dock, the boat, and the semi-dwarf plum trees, and near some wisteria twining on an arbor, Mr. Barry read, I would have to say, as if it was burdensome. There was no radio, no drinking glass, no garden tools in the scene, or on the scene’s periphery as if waiting for him—just newspaper sections stacked on the side table and, on top of them, acting as a paperweight, his glasses case.
John William’s father, in the summer of ’74, was the age I am now—fifty. I’d seen, in the house, displayed in a hall, framed photos, with captions, from his younger years—one at Cape Canaveral; a second in the cockpit of a Dash 80, shaking hands with a pilot; a third with Boeing brass at a party, holding a highball glass; a fourth on the tarmac at Boeing F
ield, standing on risers with a group of Japanese businessmen—and in each he wore the same nervous expression etching his face on that August Saturday morning when I startled him by appearing, unannounced, behind his house. In fact, I had the impression he thought I was going to rob or attack him; then quickly he understood it was just me, a friend of his son’s, and that his luck had held. Mr. Barry’s legs were already to one side, probably to keep his shoe soles off the chaise-longue cushions, so he was able to swivel up, defensively, not to his feet but to a seated position, with his newspaper section tucked in his lap, and there he removed his glasses. “It’s considerate to make some noise,” he said, “unless you’re the advance scouting party.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have our phone number?” But the question was rhetorical, in the sense that he was asking me not to surprise him in the future by coming around to the patio. On went Mr. Barry—“You’re weary of advice from adults, but clear your throat next time”—and he showed me how to do it, clearing his own against a muffling fist, as though this was a lesson in etiquette. I tried but could see no humor in him. I’m not going to say it was a sense of entitlement that governed Mr. Barry’s tone as he spoke to me, but, on the other hand, it might have been that, or partially that, there on the patio, where he was taking his lonely leisure so stringently in the breeze from off the lake.
Mr. Barry made small talk with me. On hearing that I’d gone to Europe, he was moved to say that a stint on Munda, where he’d served with the 73rd Seabees Battalion, was what he’d done in lieu of the grand tour I’d taken. On hearing that I would shortly begin freshman classes at the University of Washington, he named two regents he knew. Mr. Barry said that he’d forgotten my name, and when I reminded him of it he told me that a Countryman, years ago, had refurbished his master bathroom. Then, a little strenuously, he committed me to memory. “Neil Countryman,” he said. “Neil. Have you heard from John William? He hasn’t called or written since June.”
Our younger son, when he was twenty, disappeared like this, too. He thought surfing was the greatest thing in life and, with $80 in his pocket earned sanding for a painter, went, by himself, on a freighter, with his surfboard, to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. I say this to underscore that I understand, retrospectively, Mr. Barry’s feelings that morning on the patio. During the summer our son was gone, I saw two of his friends in Ravenna Park, and under the no-doubt transparent guise of small talk asked them what they’d heard from him—as if that was just another question, equal in weight to my questions about their jobs and warm-weather recreations. In other words, I know about these preludes—so falsely unalarmed—to a parent’s actual subject, though I didn’t grasp the matter back then, on the patio, when John William’s father asked me, barely hiding his urgency, if I’d heard lately from his son.
“No.”
Mr. Barry, in response, straightened the newspaper on his thighs, put his glasses in their case, rose off his chaise longue, and checked the Cornucopia II as a passing speedboat, hauling a water-skier, caused its mooring lines to creak and its hull to rise and fall with the water. He seemed frozen by this daredevil’s antics and the rippling of Lake Washington under his sloop, and that seemed to me an opening, or a momentary liberation, and I said, “I think I better go.”
“You think you better go.”
Once again, his tone suggested humorlessness, and so, taking the easy way out, I said “Thanks,” that serviceable and meaningless conclusion to dialogue employed by teen-agers as an exit strategy. I’ve had students who do this, thanking me when no thanks are due, just so they can get out of the room.
I BORROWED my sister’s car and went to Portland. I found out there, while browsing with Jamie at a used-book store, that Simon Magus was “the father of Christian gnosticism.” In the religion-and-philosophy section, between high shelves, Jamie told me that without my beard I no longer reminded her of Al Pacino in Serpico, and that I now looked more like Pete Maravich, the NBA basketball player well known then for his behind-the-back passes and floppy socks. We walked around Portland for a long time with no destination, and then bought, at a corner store, two apples, some rolls, a block of cheese, and a bottle of wine, and took this meal up to Jamie’s apartment, where she lived with another PSU student named Gail Thornton.
In the kitchen this morning, I asked Jamie if she remembered this small dinner in Portland. She’d forgotten it. She said that, for her, “things blur together.” Then we searched through photo albums until we found what we were looking for—a photo of Jamie’s apartment building in Portland, the Casablanca, which was faced with what looked like white fish-tank gravel. Most of its tenants were students, so there were a lot of bicycles locked to the railings, and, by the trash bin in the alley, damp pieces of jettisoned furniture. In the photo, Gail and Jamie are moving in, muscling a sofa up outdoor stairs. There’s another of Jamie wearing a red bandanna and, with a nylon brush, scrubbing her toilet. There’s a third of her standing inside the open door of her refrigerator, guzzling from a wine bottle and, it’s clear from her expression, trying not to laugh. None of this helped—Jamie, this morning, still couldn’t remember the rolls, cheese, apples, and wine, or sitting on the sofa during dinner listening to an Aretha Franklin album, or going to see Lacombe, Lucien later that night in a run-down theater, or that there were panhandlers on the street as we walked back to the Casablanca. I remember all these things, as arbitrary as they sound, as well as sleeping on the sofa after four or five glasses of Chianti poured from a gallon jug and, because it was kept in a broom closet, warm. Jamie is blank on these details, but she does recall that, at some point before dinner, we walked along streets in the Kings Heights neighborhood, noting trees and bushes we liked in yards, and noting, too, houses we admired and—this is what Jamie sees as important—we both responded to simple, clean lines and to façades pleasing in their symmetries. I have no doubt this happened, if she says it did, but I don’t remember the streets or the conversation. I do remember that, as I lay there on the sofa, with my Chianti glass—a jam jar—on the floor beside me, I thought about getting up and going into Jamie’s bedroom, fully dressed as I was, and curling against her back without saying anything about it, but I didn’t do that. I just lay there thinking of it apprehensively. There was a lot of noise from an adjacent apartment, male and female voices and a stereo with the bass turned up, and around two, Jamie went past me barefoot, wrapped in a blanket, and took care of the problem, and then we sat in the living room—me on the sofa and Jamie in a chair—and talked in soft voices, in the dark, about the tenants next door and their propensity to throw parties, and about Lacombe, Lucien, how we felt about it these hours later and whether its emotional weather remained with us. Finally, I said, “What should we do tomorrow?”
Jamie, still wrapped in her blanket, said, “What should we do right now?”
Our bungalow is empty, on a lot of days, except for me, and I admit to liking this as long as it’s fruitful, a category that is, in my view, expansive, and includes, among other things that might appear idle, the exertion of memory. I have a tendency, in fact, to place events in memory while they’re happening, which might be construed as detachment from experience, although in the end this simultaneity is, instead of something else, the experience I’m having. I remember telling myself, that first time with Jamie on my first night in Portland, not to forget what was happening as it happened, and now having told myself not to forget is bound up with the rest of that memory.
The next day, in a shop housing clutter, Jamie bought a cheap pair of Ph.D. spectacles, granny glasses with no magnification. I’ve failed to mention that she’s three years older than me, which in the beginning was something we both liked. Those glasses, so owlishly large, were a sham, because her eyesight was perfect; they’d been discarded, and she’d retrieved them as a potentially useful prop. Gail Thornton had something of this self-parodic air, too—she used a pencil to lock her hair bun together before going out at night—and
it was a joke between them. But mostly Gail wasn’t in the picture. Mostly, in her apartment at the Casablanca, Jamie and I drank warm Chianti and listened to used LPs. In ’74, we were retro, largely because music was cheaper that way. I can call up Coltrane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Seeds, and Cheap Thrills. Jamie had a record player in her room that could deliver five album sides successively, each new one dropping while the stylus rotated out of the way, so that you didn’t have to think about anything.
We walked up Nob Hill on the day after Jamie got her glasses. I bought a copy of the Kalevala—the national epic of the Finns—since a used illustrated copy of it was on sale for next to nothing and both Jamie and I were enamored of the pictures. Later, we lay on Jamie’s bed admiring these, and eventually my eyes closed. When I woke up, Jamie was sitting against two pillows with her glasses on, reading the Kalevala studiously. “Hey,” she said, “I have a question for you. ‘Shall I open up the casket, / Treasure box of magic sayings, / Strip the end off from the yarnball, / And undo the knot entirely?’” I said, “Those are beautiful lines,” and she answered, “It must be cold in Finland,” and put the book on the side table.