Plays Well With Others Page 8

  —Odd, I figured I would write of him and Angie, of this, of now. But, like all exiles, I ricocheted through time and met—returning from the front—my own genealogy. Was I lonely for that world I’d bloodied myself trying to leave? Now stuck in the back apartment with a view of coal-smudged bricks and extremely incontinent bird life, I seemed to look out on, what? A farm my family owned.

  My window might let me glimpse the Hudson. But my typewriter made a prow that crested mostly on the Shenandoah, on the surf near Sumter, the dear old River Jordan.

  I had considered myself modern till a first year in New York proved me, in subject matter, if not sexual tastes, still a rube. Some mornings after partying with Robert, the fronts of my eyeballs felt sanded. I woke feeling stranded here by accident. Strangers called my lingering accent “touching.” When I tried to sound New Yorky, they asked if I had fever blisters. My stories all returned to native soil: “One woman in my hometown stole things, anything, though her husband was the Pepsi bottler and they needed for nothing. One day, while doing the dishes, her best friend set her wedding rings on the sink’s edge …” One day in 1921, a girl in love pressed a fern to mark the afternoon she first saw him, half-naked, swimming. One day a dog got left when its divorcing couple moved. The poor Airedale trotted clear to California, feet bloodied but (during the recognition scene) its stub tail so at wag. The story, written, was better than it sounds here. At least a little better. One farm boy, maimed by a cotton bailer, is carried to the house in his sobbing father’s arm. The image that soon ran through all my pages was a Pietà, one boy or man holding, helping, another, fallen. Since I and my friends were all so healthy and so frisky and so chased, even I admitted it seemed strangely retrograde. Pals teased me that I was a history-buff traditionalist. (I was, alas, a closet prophet.)

  “Living Up Here”

  t Ossorio’s, we’d long since claimed a table called Ours. Angie’s handwritten “reserved” sign stayed there full-time, Scotch-taped to marble. True, ours was stuck in back near the kitchen’s dangerous swinging door. But the round table rested under one shelved plaster statue called Our Lady of Perpetual Help and stood near its own loyal radiator.

  As we passed the coffee shop, we’d crane against plate glass window, trying to avoid our own blinding reflection, to see if anyone from the gang was there. Arriving or rushing off, about to go to bed at noon or up and out by two p.m., you heard who’d done what to/with whom the night before. People were forever leaving things behind. Sunglasses. Her Zippo. Angie stocked her leather cowgirl backpack with her finds from The Honored Owl. She picked up odd leaflets about color theory (beautiful prismatic illustrations tipped in), works about ancient religion, or how-to guides for outdated etiquette. These were often left stacked on the radiator behind our table. This way you tended to find good reading if you got there first (and hadn’t brought along your own Great American Novel in progress).

  In one New York care package, Mom sent photos reproduced from family tintypes. I first stuffed these in my sock drawer. But the harder New York’s streetlife got, the more often my rent fell due, the more of these images emerged. Now I typed toward tintypes. Each face (containing ingredient-features partly mine) became a separate votive candle, permanently lit. If my van Gogh postcard or one such forebear got pushed out of its ritual place, I couldn’t focus, couldn’t imagine over the maelstrom flood of car alarms, spats, and sirens.

  My desktop lay strewn with gluepots, brushes, round-nosed scissors, and the pedicure clippers I used on finer punctuation. Looking back from our present age of the computer, a quill pen might’ve seemed perfectly at home there. I could’ve been Santa’s secretary, making a list, checking it twice.

  My great grandfather’s tintype showed him wearing his moth-eaten gray uniform. He had served under the daring young Mosby. Gramps’s face was a grizzled rehearsal for my present smoothed performance; but at least our busy pressured eyes rhymed.

  I touched the frame and Colonel Harbison Increase Hartley. Though not born of the officer class, though too poor to own a slave, Increase Hartley had outlived most of his division’s aristocrats. The seminary boys had been made only reckless by their learning. Field promotions and a sense of duty helped Increase rise in rank. His name is still listed in the histories of two major battles.

  After the war, he returned to anonymous subsistence farming. He had not bettered his family’s lot via the freebie valor so generally admired on market Saturdays. He did turn up in Mosby’s famous memoir: “No officer serving under me ever cared more for his men. From their blankets’ repair to the cuts of their hard-won bacon, he noticed all. No one else was such a very Mars while in ire and dander. No one proved so precise a horseman nor so ferocious a defender of his troops. We each respected and half-feared our somber, dutiful, and pious young Increase Hartley.”

  To me then, this seemed damning with faint praise. A soldier’s merits had been cited without once mentioning the Enemy.

  My Yankee friends, finding family resemblance cobbling every surface, mistook me for a blueblood. Only highborn Northern folks seem so obsessed with lineage. You know, somehow I failed to correct my friends’ mistake. I recalled my father’s bemused disgust when I advanced my “Dickie” clear to “Hartley.” All at age five. There are many kinds of pedigrees. In our great country, the simple will toward betterment remains a biggie. Increase Hartley, indeed!

  Quorum

  wo of us always seemed to be sitting outside a building waiting for the other to show. As if my job were that of scout, making the world safe for our incoming three-way democracy, I was usually early. I hated the role; resented its necessity; but never managed being mysteriously tardy. Robert arrived—the very second you first feared he wouldn’t. Angie, trailing helpers, cabbies, street kids, dragged up ten to twenty minutes late. Custom could not stale her infinite excuses. I would rise, bend into her lastest explanation, kiss her hair—whatever color. Angie’s scent was that of clean feet and hot rocks. She smelled agitated. She smelled … late.

  “God, we got caught in the Haiti Liberation Day Parade, wonderful magenta frilled shirts, I want one, but you wouldn’t believe the traffic backed up midtown…. Before that, I was running ahead of schedule for a change but somebody threw himself under the train at Eighteenth Street. For half a block of track and the white station tile, such a mess … Grapeade shading off more to the color of weak Lipton tea.”

  “Lunch anyone?” Robert, dry, asked. We laughed.

  I knew I was just one of a million kids my age trying to paint or write or compose. Compose here. Others roomed in my very building. With their outsized bargain winter coats, just the sight of them squirreling the pitiable mail from home off into their cubicles filled me with such shame. What seemed noble in my gifted friends looked only sad in strangers.

  I’d wake to hear kids’ typewriters clacking, besting mine in cascading volleys at 3 a.m. Other voices, worse linoleums.

  I could not explain my faith in what I did. It was not yet even faith in my own work, since that was fetal. It was more a faith in the right to work. The beauty of just trying. It was, at first, belief in the option to fail magnificently (and, thank God, magnificently far from home).

  Who’d need know? We’d die here, old, together, safe with each other’s secrets. We were each other’s juvenilia.

  I had some angel-overview sense that I was, if not so beautiful as Robert, if not nearly so gifted as our Angie—then not unhandsome, never truly tineared, replete with some capacities and many a courtesy. I sure put in the hours. And I had the nervous luck of the upper-middle class to back me up.

  Now I see, so much derived from the rushing horsey talents of my friends. Their shouldering force, my flying buttresses. Others wanted their bodies, then wanted to create as they did, soon others copied them and failed, then others—feeling rebuffed—reviled them. This just made Robert and Angie somewhat more famous. (If getting imitated means anything, and it does.)

  —I saw how my pals dealt w
ith the byproduct poison of being a little too visible a bit too soon. If they believed in me one quarter as much as I felt sure of them … We might all do something yet.

  I tried, during Sunday drinktime phone calls, to state my excitement to the folks. But—even if I had subjected my parents to the shock of seeing where I lived—no working lock on the street-level door, an elevator rarely functioning and then coffin-sized and urinal-odiferous—even if I drew them up four steep flights to my desk and reassured them with the desktop gallery of family mugs, even if I showed them draft after typed draft, mark upon inked mark, even if I convinced them I was writing about honest farmers whose prettiest sons (preferably shirtless) got bad-hurt way back when, how could I justify what I was trying here in Yankeeland? Maybe I was like Angie, banished from the beautiful town that wanted her in sight but never quite included; surely it was lucky that I had no wife, no kids, no chance of harming any family through my long quixotic try at adding, to a basement bookstore, still more mellow dust.

  I knew only this: my locale, my work, my friendships all felt necessary. It was spiritual mainlining and I mostly woke up hopeful. I trusted I’d remain this lucky. There were so many beautiful people to talk to, to bed, and, perhaps finest of all, to talk to, afterward, in bed. Was learning ever easier? Was anything not possible?

  My “collection of short stories,” my “novel,” and my address book grew. But the address book expanded far faster. Its characters sure “held reader interest” longer.

  Angie hunted for a boyfriend and a gallery, not necessarily in that order. Robert sought some peace from all the boys and girls he’d made be pineapple-upside-down cake. Said he needed time, to compose music.

  On Gathering Content

  f I ever worried that I’d squandered my first thirty-three years, I pulled out the seven earlier address books that proved otherwise. I sometimes left these propped among my kinfolks’ antique pictures on the desk. Even then, they seemed one form of modern achievement.

  Remember your own starter address book? Do you recall the color of your first person-gathering kit?—Mine was red. Red is still my favorite color (also Robert’s and Angie’s). The day I turned twelve, I bought the book for forty-nine cents under a sign MEETING ALL YOUR STATIONERY AND BOOKKEEPING NEEDS. At Belk Tyler’s Department Store in bustling uptown Falls, North Carolina. The price had been slashed, down from a dollar. I knew it was meant as mine. I was so sure, I got an erection. But then at twelve, the sight of a blooming apple tree could give me such an upsurge.

  A cherry-red leatherette near-toy, Book Number One was little larger than a commemorative stamp. “Important Addresses” had been engraved across its glossy cover in gilt, not twenty-four-carat. At public pay phones, in our hometown (whose every household could then be reached by dialing just five digits), I soon whipped out my sassy reference work. Letting others see it made me feel half-sexual with my own sense of worldliness and longing and connections. One passing farmer rolled his eyes.

  Needing to fill the pages, I resorted to lackluster second cousins. I did. I was so low on R’s, I even listed my own Sunday school teacher, a local radio announcer with a shriveled hand, a man I would not have phoned at gunpoint to save my family’s lives.

  It’ll sound briefly immodest but even at age twelve, I was not without mail. My one official pen pal was an ungainly older girl with black bangs and absurdly sturdy legs. Trudy T—. She hailed from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and I’d met her when both our families camped at an evergreened state park. Her father was a very gung-ho football coach. His cement-gray crewcut stood utterly on end like a gym class forced to do Nazi jumping jacks. Trudy’s handsome, dark kid brother yelled a lot, hyperventilated, broke off a good-sized tree limb and, with it, beat—for no reason I could see—all four tires of his family’s Plymouth. “Just, let, that, show, you,” pounding, he instructed whitewalls.

  Studying him, my mother told her young sons, “Steer clear of that one.”

  Trudy’s brother had been given a new red ax. Mistake. Through camp one day, a snapping turtle came crawling. The thing gathered a crowd, marveling, if from five feet behind. Haltered tourists aimed their Kodaks. The creature was lead-colored, immense, quite visibly ancient. Serrated ridges like some dinosaur’s stood upright along the domed center of its shell.

  One crazy brother swerved from nowhere. Before adults could stop him, he’d chopped into this beast’s bowed complicated back. No natural awe, no fellow-feeling, slowed him. Coursing through this kid—first testosterone, grainy and rattly as white sugar. The dying turtle looked a century old. It’d grown at roughly the rate rocks do. It was nearly big across as an auto tire. The sound of new steel severing its bony platelets, the sight of how the beast’s head and legs and tail, first tucked inside, exited writhing as blade entered hidden flesh—I’ll never forget. The turtle thrashed so, biting air, hissing. And I, alongside Trudy, palms pressed to our cheeks, screamed bloody murder. We two screamed as if auditioning for Hitchcock.

  Trudy felt the two of us had lived through something momentous and were friends for life. A girl eighteen, she somehow fixated on me—one freckled, allergic, sweetly squeamish kid barely twelve.

  Vacation over, I rolled home to find six letters already waiting. Trud’s stationery was pink, scented. Such notes at once became my family’s joke. “Rome-e-oleo,” was my new nickname. Teasing and whipping: a loving way of life with us. In our household, the weak did not survive. You learned to laugh, because you’d better. Good practice for later, for New York.

  My own jotted answers to Trudy eventually faltered, then condensed to postcards. I finally grew silent. I had much to tell someone, okay. But maybe not a girl whose attractions fell below even those of my dowdy powdered aunts. She was a girl who’d begged me to kiss, for practice, if not her mouth, then, okay, her arm? Deep in the woods of an overcrowded state park, I found myself fastened to one pale wrist of a plump girl. To indicate a deeper interest, to spare her feelings, as a born caretaker, I, gallant, frenched her wrist. She wriggled, sighing. I remember that. Anything to please. I was already a junior trainee artist.

  Somehow my postcards ceased, causing Trudy’s chipper martyred tone to slowly curdle. First it intensified to miffedness then starched itself toward irony. “You are no doubt busy with your other so-called ‘friends’” soon became “I knew you’d leave me, as does everyone, in Pennsylvania or the Universe generally.”

  Twelve years old, I read her waiting letter daily, with a sickening appetite for fresh news of her pain’s location. I felt a sad awe at how I’d damaged her health and self-esteem. What shady rock had those slid beneath today? I re-called the giant turtle, mottled gray-khaki-black, moving away from us through piney daylight, its shell opened, raw and glistening, grape-purple, to sunshine. The creature sputtering its final sound, pulled its weight toward woods, a red ax still wedged—bookmark—in its opened back. The thing was still alive enough to know it must use final strength to go and try and hide its dying.

  Trudy’s immediate pain soon crawled off too far to even attempt answering: This was my first correspondence, she—my first legitimate and romantic address. I failed her. Trudy: my starter course in unrequited (unrequired) love. I am sorry.

  Now I know she loved me, Trudy. Truly. It then seemed hideous and so arbitrary for some heavy sigh-prone girl, eighteen, to actually love a skinny kid unscathed by manhood. I now know: Love is often far more surreal, far more arbitrary.

  Though Trudy was someone I would never dare write again, I did need one more out-of-state address. If I ever felt bold enough ahead, I could find her. So, into my prized red booklet, Trudy’s name and stats arrived, months after her own clear silence cooled and hardened into a lead-colored shell. I inscribed her—so large that “Trudy” extruded, two whole pages all her own. Homage. “There,” I said. She would’ve liked that.

  I ennobled my childish roster with phone numbers for the fire department, how to summon an ambulance. Because you never knew. There was still the sha
me of having no known L, and certainly—in Scotch-Irish North Carolina—no exotic X’s, Y’s, or Z’s.

  For the first two decades, each new address book gained inches as did my formerly twenty-three-inch waist. If you graduate from school a year early, if you win a scholarship up North especially, they have to let you leave. For a while, you’re magically eighteen. You admit to feeling really “old.” You like it when the adults moan over your saying this. Time and life seem purely additive.

  Only new folks in your book. They each seem brainier, flashier, less local, and far dearer than the dreary hometown ones. This, you think, is living.

  You soon acquire three whole L’s, and one V (if only an acquaintance met on a train). As your school chums go forth, then procreate and sort of prosper, as work leads you, there’s a need to buy another, bigger, sturdier volume; soon the folder has outgrown anything merely “pocket-sized.” You graduate to a desktop address book with simu-leather alphabetic tabs. Traveling, you pack that item last, so you can unpack it first. It has now grown more essential than your toothbrush (those, you can replace at any airport). If your book is not in sight, you pat your pockets, fearing for your keys too. Already you suspect it is most truly you. —Justifying the address book and loving its lives, that is your real life’s work.

  This is the time of gathering names. Unto everything, a season. This one occurs before that harvest rite called editing—a middle-aged virtue and necessity. This happens long before First Death gets your attention. Death? Isn’t that a Strike Force that grabs pets and other less lucky kids’ grandparents? Cartoon characters can fall off cliffs and magically reconstitute. They merely shake themselves, then road-run right back up rock-facing. At twenty, there’s such reckless traction.