I also went up to the Valhallas once, with two mountaineering friends who shared my interest in those peaks. We passed our first night at Camp Stick-in-the-Eye, not far from where, years before, I’d disconsolately read Eliot by flashlight. I wanted to tell these friends everything. I imagined showing them the cave, but instead we made camp in a high, damp meadow and climbed as many spires and pinnacles as we had time for, and slid around in chutes full of scree, and sat under the stars late at night arguing about politics and talking, as I recall, about lightweight hiking equipment. These were two guys I’d met through the Mountaineers who were not too serious about technical climbing and whose company I enjoyed, but, still, I didn’t tell them how much time I’d spent in this region, or why or how I’d spent it, and, the last I heard, one of them had rheumatoid arthritis and was no longer hiking, and the other had moved to Phoenix.
There was a time when we had a membership at the Pacific Science Center. It was cheaper that way to take our sons to the exhibits, the Planetarium, the IMAX movies, the Tropical Butterfly House, and the laser shows. We’ve seen robotic dinosaurs, played virtual soccer, posed at the Shadow Wall, tested our hand-eye coordination, and eaten lunch at the Fountain Café and in the Brown Bag Court. I would say that, a dozen times over the years, Jamie and I shelled out pennies and nickels and watched the boys make wishes before they tossed their coins into the pools. When I told Jamie about the harvesting I’d done there, in these same pools, with John William, she laughed and then, with no warning, hit me in the solar plexus.
We took the boys to Fort Clatsop once, years ago, between Christmas and New Year’s, to see where the Lewis and Clark Expedition had overwintered at the western terminus of their slog. “Fort” seemed very much the wrong word for the modest, palisaded hovels replicated there by the National Park Service, but we were able, despite that, to glean a little of the feeling of a winter in those woods under duress. A volunteer dressed in period clothes demonstrated the firing of a powder musket, which made an unimpressive bang and left a singed smell in the air. Then our sons tried writing their names with quill pens, and started fires, or tried to start fires, with flint, steel, and char cloth. Of course, during all of this I thought of John William. The candle-making demonstration and the short course on tanning hides hit me, that day, with all the force of bad dreams. Afterward, we drove to Tillamook, toured the cheese plant, and ate ice cream from waffle cones at a table outside the souvenir shop. I took comfort in this—when the boys were young, I took comfort in them because they gave my life a shape. So it was discomfiting to see them reach and then surpass the age at which I met John William. I had to collect the boys once, a few years back, after they’d gone out to Kalaloch with two friends, one of whom had managed to roll his pickup into a ditch. All four of them looked hungover when I arrived on the scene. It made me think of getting lost in the North Cascades in ’72.
Before they were married, Wiley and Erin decided to climb Mount Rainier. Wiley insisted on a “shakedown cruise” with his equipment, and since he was eager to see the rain forest, we hiked up the main fork of the Hoh together while Jamie and Erin went to Portland. On the trail, I heard about Wiley’s first marriage, which technically wasn’t over, and about his children, a girl and a boy, who lived with their mother in Georgetown. “Why would I ever want to be the cause of someone else’s pain?” Wiley said, meaning his kids, but he was also of the opinion that the woman still technically his wife was a “horrendously poor listener who deserved what she was going through.” I wanted to say, “Over that ridge, on the other side of the river, my friend lies dead in a cave, Wiley,” partly because we were there, and partly because it’s hard to keep a secret like that when someone else has let his guard down the way Wiley had let down his. But in the end, and maybe ridiculously, there was that oath over swapped blood, and so, instead of mentioning John William, I asked Wiley how old his kids were.
The closest I came to breaking my pact with John William was in Room 104 during Modern English Literature. I’d moved things along that quarter so as to leave time for stories by Frank O’Connor and Alan Sillitoe, and so we read “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” and came to the paragraph where Sillitoe writes, from the point of view of a reform-school boy in a long-distance race:
I could just see the corner of the fenced-up copse in front where the only man I had to pass to win the race was going all out to gain the half-way mark. Then he turned into a tongue of trees and bushes where I couldn’t see him anymore, and I couldn’t see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me.
And, of course, this made me think of John William, which I told my students for no good reason. I told them that I had raced like this myself, with something like that kind of loneliness, against a boy from Lakeside who subsequently became my friend. I said we’d found a hot spring in the mountains and made a blood pact not to reveal its location. They looked at me as if wondering whether this digression had a point, and so I read Sillitoe’s passage aloud a second time, and we pondered it together. One student thought Sillitoe was interested in “the terror at the heart of nature” another thought Sillitoe was telling the reader “that once you see the truth about things there’s no turning back.” This latter emerged as the interpretation of choice. We added the English castes to the mix. I told them about the “Angry Young Men.” Someone, naturally, brought up Camus. I miss having conversations like this with teen-agers—I’m done teaching now; it’s summer and I won’t be going back—but it would be better if a teacher didn’t have so many papers to correct. It’s the papers that make teachers think twice.
I WAS AT SHOREY’S. Shorey’s had moved to Fremont and wasn’t the same, but the booksellers there were as moody, impolitic, and distracted as ever, and still made a point of not noticing anybody. A coffeehouse had been attached, with a stained-glass window and an antique couch, so now the line between book browsing and coffee drinking was blurred—I would see someone standing in front of a bookshelf with an espresso, and it would break the spell I was under. But no matter. My zeal for the esoteric author and the strange title remained intact. And I still enjoyed the unraveling of purpose I felt around decrepit volumes. But my keenest enthusiasm was for little-known poets. Their chapbooks, limited editions, and self-published pamphlets held promise. I thought I might find something unappreciated but inspired on a page I hadn’t looked at yet. And so, on this day in ’98, at about the time when the lead news story concerned impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, I was in a book-lined cubbyhole at Shorey’s, hopefully perusing a collection called Chronic Obsessions by a poet named Robert Leventhal. It had been self-published, on excellent paper, in ’74. It was noted, in the back, that Chronic Obsessions was a letterpress printed in a limited edition of 250 copies. Fifty copies had been bound in cloth and boards.
Robert Leventhal didn’t suffer from the fatal flaw of many poets, which is a surfeit of self-regard. His trick was to write in the persona of a woman whose sensuality was tinged with sadomasochism, so that for the reader—or for this reader—the thought of a Robert Leventhal behind the words was an invitation to distress. I read his first poem and felt provoked, I would say, by this sense of an alter ego at work, or of someone obfuscating. On the other hand, I imagined Leventhal arguing that provocation was his purpose, and I pictured him as an academic, rail-thin, with a three-day growth of beard and a morose lecturing style. In “Santa Fe Interregnum” he wrote:
I made the journey to Santa Fe.
There I followed the sisterly example and observed complete celibacy
But could not hold to this and became a painter of landscapes.
In the sun I took a hirsute lover.
I scourged him with nettles and dug in my
nails.
In return, he abused me.
And so we made love to our shadows each morning
In transcendent light. Hairy kundalini satyr invented by Eros—
I called him this and other names with
Twenty layers of irony. Soon we walked on our
Hands to Taos. I painted nude men with diminutive
Cocks while they appeared at odds with themselves.
That moment when the guilt cult of Thanatos
Could be seen in their faces—I tried to catch this
After midnight. As it turned out my Theravadan was
A happy bisexual. He thought I was a beguiling creature from
Wealthy Corinth. But I had been impregnated by the
Errant seed of Encolpius, and as I swelled, my satyr enjoyed
Me up into my sternum while urgent to touch the
Growing alien. That I was carrying someone else’s
Genetic complement made my lover
Insane with pleasure. I painted my
History for his benefit and because, as he said,
It was part of his metaphysics. It was my life before
Santa Fe he wanted to possess while dabbling in
Tantra. This lover put an ear to my pubis and listened to
My parasite while I told him how Priapus had struck,
At 3 a.m., with no advance warning,
In the form of bladder-blocking semi-tumescence.
How after five seconds of missionary enthusiasm it was
Over, except for our separate trips to the
Gabinetto, where I earnestly failed to douche free
His seed. And so I am with child while my lover
Knives me. It’s wonderfully strange.
Sitting on a stool in my cubbyhole at Shorey’s, reading this Robert Leventhal poem written in the voice of a pregnant Southwest landscape painter, was like seeing Norman Bates as his mother near the end of Psycho. The wig falls off and the dress falls open, and then, after a psychiatrist explains Norman’s warped psychology, his dual personalities, we see him in a chair with a blanket on his shoulders, talking to himself in his mother’s voice.
I turned a page in Chronic Obsessions and read “First Words”:
After my grandmother went earthwardAfter my grandmother went earthward
In unflattering regalia
I spied in the distance
The man who would be my husband.
Why did I pretend to have an errand?
The cups by the cut-glass bowl of lemonade needed
Straightening and I straightened them
While the Negro at the
Serving ladle didn’t watch.
He kept his hands behind his back and looked into
The middle distance. “Just ignore me,” I said, and
In reply he dipped his head to one side.
Around the back of the gazebo I “bumped” into
The man who would become my husband.
He cupped a hand over my shoulder in an effort to
Hold me upright. Chevrons were stitched
On the arm of his summer dress jacket.
I slipped my shoulder free
But his raised hand stayed as if to signal
Pure intentions. He raised it further, as if taking an
Oath. He raised the other, like a fugitive at
Gunpoint. He did these things humorlessly. Then he
Stood in a posture of obeisance that was a little
Reminiscent of my current lover,
Male couchant, with his eyes rolled back in his head.
My husband-to-be now began to
Teeter. His five o’clock shadow was a matrix of
Tiny pinholes. He seemed to have a pointed
Breastbone, like a bird. His manner included no detectable irony.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to touch you.”
Those were my husband’s first words.
I wasn’t much impressed by Robert Leventhal, partly because I couldn’t hear his music, and partly because he read like soap opera. But I knew from other chapbooks I’d opened through the years that there might be a gem where it wasn’t expected. So I read, next, “I Torture Myself”:
For fun. This must be said: for fun.
And when I am done for the moment with
Torturing myself
I torture him as a sacrifice to the
Goddess of resentment.
I like to pin him to his altar.
My shame at this is worse than
My husband reading the paper
After work. He folds each section,
Feet crossed at the ankles,
And wonders, because he has to, about
Eisenhower’s health.
There are fine forms of
Torture. A subtle art, and nuanced,
Rooted in the beginning of time,
Torture is Eros. One form of torture
Demands doing nothing while another demands
All. Let your victim weep
Both ways. Let your victim
Bleed: never staunch a fresh wound.
If you hear him crying, for no reason,
From his chamber, be happy
Because it was so easy, this
Torture via absence, this torture in not doing.
Let him torture himself.
The days are long this way.
This torturer knows ennui.
I need to be doing the
Work that has chosen me—
The incitement of pain.
But since this prison is for
Both of us he stuffs my ears with
Agony. How do I tell him that
My choices are bad
In this era of limitation?
That the lonely torturer behind the
Mask hates him so much it
Feels like love?
Baby—please don’t blame me.
Hurt for my sake, be Christ-like,
And suffer as I suffered when you
Tore through my womb.
I would have slid Chronic Obsessions back in among the other chapbooks if I hadn’t happened to notice, in its table of contents, the title “Alki, 1851,” which was also the title of the poem I’d read twenty-six years before, in Ginnie Barry’s study, after smoking weed there with John William—the poem Ginnie’d had printed as a broadside and then displayed, framed, with her name on it as poet, behind her writing table:
They oared ashore through rain,
And though they were egregious in their long-distance purpose,
Kamogwa didn’t suck them under in his gyre,
And Thunderbird, on high, watched.
Their friends hanged Bad Jim.
At the Mad House, Sawdust Women plied for coin.
Eskimo Joe cut timber in a union shirt.
Ikt papa ikt sockala Tiee—one pope and one God—or so it was proclaimed.
Next came the box-houses and lectures on phrenology,
Faro and Little Egypt, dancing nude,
Bunco, vaudeville, nickelodeons, ragtime,
Pantages, jugglers, graft.
Then donkey engines turned bull teams to beef.
The wool dogs of the Squaxin went quietly extinct.
It rained on the tree farms and on the monuments to loggers,
And the Utopian Socialists surrendered.
The Minuteman: they built it.
The engineers in the football stadium:
It’s they who dreamed up Dyna-Soar,
Awake beside sleeping wives.
So I cast this prayer on the Ocean of Compassion:
O rising phallus on the plain above the waters,
Be as you are, germ seed of the future,
Help me to count what cannot be counted,
World after world,
And anchor me in Anchorless Mind,
Until I cease.
This same poem was in “Robert Leventhal’s” chapbook. In other words, John Wi
lliam’s mother had a pen name.
I SAW VIRGINIA BARRY twice after her son disappeared. The first time, a middle-school art teacher we know invited Jamie and me to an opening at a gallery in Pioneer Square that was exhibiting his work, and so we went, and milled uncomfortably, and drank wine, and looked very closely at my colleague’s oil paintings, most of them done on modest canvases. This gallery was only a little wider than a hallway, so it was impossible to linger over the art without having someone pass between us and it every few seconds. It was shoulder to shoulder in there, and loud, because a lot of people clearly knew each other; there were dozens of conversations under way, and a lot of light striking wineglasses. In short, our brick-walled vault felt cramped and chaotic. Since our friend had drawn an overflow crowd, I was able to speak to him only briefly before it was someone else’s turn to greet the artist. After that I wanted to leave, but instead I found Jamie again, and we made a second jostling circuit of the paintings. “I’m not sure this is me,” she observed.
Later, someone silenced the crowd with an insistent fork and wineglass. It took me a while to realize that it was John William’s mother who wanted to address us. Her hair was black and silver now, and she wore it pulled so tightly back it seemed to lift her forehead. On the other hand, she hadn’t gained a pound since I’d seen her, thirteen years before, standing near the doorway of Lucy Hatch’s office with her fist against her mouth, trying not to laugh after I’d said, about John William, “He’s a good guy. You raised him well.” If anything, Ginnie looked even more sleek. She’d aged in a glamorous and enviable style and was striking the way women in their sixties can be striking. Ginnie handed off her wineglass and opened her palms as if to bless the gathered art-lovers. “Welcome,” she said. “Many of you know me, but for those who don’t, I’m Virginia Worthington, owner of this gallery, which is so remarkably managed by my friend Nora Friedman.” Applause, plus a smile and a wave from Nora Friedman. While this was unfolding, Ginnie reached back and took the measure of her chignon, turning her head slightly down and leftward. In profile, under track lights, wearing an embroidered bolero jacket and leather pants, she looked, I thought, self-possessed.