Coming into the End Zone (3 page)

Having nothing better to do, the immortal prose I summoned this morning somehow not having arrived, I study the places. Albany, New York. Moody Beach, Maine. MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Iowa Writers Workshop. St. Maarten. St. John, Virgin Islands. A bank of the Delaware River. Cozumel, Mexico. Kailuum, Mexico. Surry, Maine. Lewes, Delaware.…

Superstition has persuaded me that the words I require often come not from my hand, my pen, or my head but from my clipboard's thin pressed-board interior. To bolster this belief, I once took a strip of printed plastic left behind by the previous writer-occupant of my office in Iowa, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and pasted it at the top of the board. It reads: ‘In the beginning was the word.'

The day grows hotter. Seven-thirty now. The white page clipped to the board is still virgin, unmarked by me but wrinkled with damp. The only certainty is the firm, commanding way the clip holds the paper, surer of its function than I am of mine. Where is the word according to St. John, with which to begin?

The maid comes this morning. When I was a girl, the last time I had a maid until I came to Washington, my mother called all servants ‘treasures.' Why? I wonder. Because she felt she had found them, exclusively? Because they were hers alone? Because they were, theoretically, faithful, of great value to household order, asking nothing but small pay and the rewarding sense of having served well? I think she believed all this of her treasures.

My treasure, a young girl from Puerto Rico, comes an hour and a half late. Still, she is a rarity in Washington because she does arrive. She commands hefty pay, close to twelve dollars an hour if she stays only the few hours she seems to be here. She is sketchy about her dusting. Underneath the beds she never cares to explore, nor behind or beneath any stationary furniture. She is hostile to interior windowsills, seeming to believe they are not part of the house, and resentful of fingerprints wherever they may appear. She leaves bottles and bottle caps, oily rags, and pieces of the vacuum in strategic places so I will know she has been there and used them.

But she
is
my treasure. She does what I no longer want to do, she brings some order and shine to our possessions, she makes the house smell of cleaning agents (even if it is not very clean) and Guardsman furniture polish. In my lifetime I have had too little practice with servants. I shy away from giving her instructions or even complaining about her omissions. I hide in my study, feeling guilty about having her do what I should be doing myself. My mother was very good at the mistress-servant relationship. She believed that the mistress had the upper hand over the treasure. In her time that was probably true. But not now. I am humbly, undemandingly grateful for any action my treasure deems it proper to take.

I cower behind my PC, and wait to go over from the carriage house to the main house until I see the lights are turned off. She has gone. I can have a guiltless lunch, repossess the house, recover from my feelings of inadequacy and failure, breathe in the deceptive odor of Murphy's Soap.

The mail has come. There are nine brown cardboard book boxes that the mailman, in his customary snit at the volume of my mail, has dumped down in a messy pile in the vestibule. The letters he sticks through the slot in the door. While I wait for my usual Progresso minestrone soup to heat up (I am an obsessive eater who likes repetition in foods, perhaps because I am too unskilled to think up variations), I shuffle through the mail.

The usual assortment. Requests for contributions, including one from a local public television station which seems to eat up its meager budget with frequent mailings asking for contributions. A case of the cat consuming its own tail. Three solicitations of my support for the local opera, the local Kennedy Center patrons' group, the local Arena theater. An olio of catalogues including—yes, I knew it was about time for it again—one from Comfortably Yours.

The clothes in most of the catalogues, sent unbidden, are for persons two sizes smaller and thirty years younger than I. There are catalogues for men's equipment, including one for hunting clothes and one entirely devoted to guns and knives, although I have not lived with a man for seventeen years. One is filled with elaborate toys and clothes for children: my youngest child is now thirty-seven years old.

I am too exasperated to look through the rest. I carry the third-class mail, the catalogues, the publishers' advance notices, the requests for money and subscriptions, to the kitchen and put them into a plastic sack together with the book containers which, opened, seem to have swelled to twice their original size. Tomorrow I will carry the lumpy, swollen sack down the back steps, across the garden, into the carriage house and place it in a can, to be put outside the garage on the proper pickup days.

To what end this useless, expensive effort for the publishers, and then for me? I have to dispose of matter I did not send for, do not want, and resent because it tires me to dispose of it.

David Macauley wrote and illustrated a wonderful book called
Motel of the Mysteries
, a spoof on the Tutankhamen discoveries. It supposes that our North American civilization, due to a reduction in third-and fourth-class postal rates, is suddenly buried and destroyed under the weight of
pollutum literatum
. Massive amounts of paper harden into rock, and our civilization is lost to human history for a thousand years.

Carrying the discarded mail from front door to kitchen to garden to pails in the garage, to the alley, I can believe this will happen here. We will all soon be similarly buried and petrified under our junk mail. It will take the discovery of ‘a series of writings attributed to the late-twentieth-century Franco-Italian traveler Guido Michelin' (to quote Macauley) to explain how it all happened. Lovely book.

A bad night. I thought of Bill Whitehead and Robert Ferro dead and gone. I wondered how death had seemed to them at the moment of its arrival. I dreamed about the pains of dying. Does it hurt? I seemed to be asking my mother, as if I were a child again and she would know about such things.

When I woke at four, I remembered a poem I once could recite: ‘Thanatopsis.' William Cullen Bryant's idea was that death was pleasant, like a dreamless sleep, of which, upon awakening, one says: ‘It was my best night's sleep.' At five I was still awake, having decided that the poem eliminated one consoling certainty. Only if one was sure one would wake after the deep, unbroken sleep would one lie down fearlessly. Just so for death.

With that, I was afraid to go back to sleep, got up and made coffee and waited in the living room until I heard the
Times
bounce up on our iron steps.

I meet my neighbor across the alley while I am putting out the garbage. He is in his bathrobe and has lost a lot of weight. I don't know his name after almost four years of proximity, and my ignorance has gone on so long it is too late to ask him. We refer to him as Mr. Lone Star, the name of the restaurant he once owned, a topless lunch establishment by day, a gay bar at night. We assume he is gay; under my workroom window on weekends young men, their radios turned up to loud, hard rock, wash their cars, or his boat, or his van. On occasion in the spring, he drives a motorcycle that he revs up and then roars out of his garage.

Although once on familiar terms, despite my ignorance of his name—he no doubt is ignorant of ours—we now say little to each other. It is an aborted acquaintance which never developed because none of us made an effort. Now, I eye his shrunken waistline and diminished stomach, and wonder: Can he be sick? And then I reproach myself: Not everyone who loses weight is sick, although at times, in my despair, it appears to be so. My association with Bill and Robert and Michael, and now Richard, makes me suspect the terrible affliction in everyone I see who looks thinner. Like evil: Because we know it to be within us, we then think it must inhabit everyone else.

This afternoon is my time to tape for the radio. The job I have had for a number of years is a strange one for me, a print devotee. Out of a month's reading, I choose four books I have liked, and write a short review for each, to be broadcast on National Public Radio on the morning news program.

To write these reviews is an exercise in brevity, even painful compression. I have somewhat less than three minutes to introduce a book, describe it to some extent, and provide some judgments about it. No more than five hundred words. Given the meagerness of time, I have decided to review only books I like, not to waste precious airtime on diatribes against poor books.

I go uptown to M Street to tape, four reviews at a time. I sit in a silent booth, the engineer on the other side of a glass partition, my producer, Don Lee, in the booth with me because I am not very good at fluent reading anymore. I pop my
p
's, a mistake that sounds like an explosion on the air. I often read the wrong word, stammer (an affliction left over, on occasion, from childhood), or mispronounce a proper noun. These failures require retaping, of a sentence usually. But when you hear me early on
Morning Edition
, you would never know about these slips. Lee has a device that splices out errors and substitutes the corrected forms. I sound fluent and correct, although he has not been able to do much about the increasing slowness with which I speak.

When I hear myself on radio I think how wonderful it would be if all the failings of growing old could be so easily corrected by technology.

Today my reviews are pretty eclectic. One,
My First Summer in the Sierra
by John Muir, is a large handmade volume, a $785 beauty which the Yolla Bolly Press in California has published in an edition of 155 copies. Elegant paper, endpapers designed and made by hand in Mexico by Otomi Indians, binding handsewn, covered in a handwoven rough linen fabric. Every detail of the production of this book is fine. But the cost is high. My intention is to explain why owning such a book is an aesthetic as well as intellectual pleasure.

The second is
Cavalry Maiden
by Nadezha Durova, a Russian woman who managed to join the cavalry and fight bravely against Napoleon. Stirred by patriotism, a dislike of domestic limitations on women, and a passion for horses, Durova served in the army for nine years, even after her sex was discovered. A curious yet engrossing book to choose, published by a university press, Indiana, that takes chances on such works, to my delight.

A biography of Charlotte Mews. I picked it because I did not know who Charlotte Mews was, and wondered why a novelist as skilled as Penelope Fitzgerald wanted to write about so obscure a figure (to me). Turns out it is a superior biography about a fascinating and talented, if now forgotten, poet. I like reviewing books like this, to educate myself, and then my listeners.

The fourth: a novel by Alice Hoffman, called
At Risk
. Oh dear God, I thought, when I read the galleys on the train coming back from New York months ago, can I bear to read about an eleven-year-old girl who contracts AIDS from a blood transfusion? Every page hurt to read. But it seemed a good book to review. The moral, unspoken but clear, is the vulnerability of everyone to the terrible scourge, and the inhumanity of those who wish to avoid contact with it, or think they can. The victim is a child gymnast, a fine athlete, which makes the story even more poignant.

At noon, I will go into the recording studio, wait for the sign to start, give a voice level, and then, in my stumbling way, read the alembic remains of all this reading, like the kitchen midden of a vanished civilization, into a microphone.

Another hot day. The temperature threatens to go as high as 104 degrees by afternoon. On the deck I find a dead cicada who did not survive the night's oppression, a beautiful creature even in death, with lacy, iridescent wings and a thick multicolored body. Its bulging eyes are far apart and look like offset stones. I take it to my study to save, a reminder of the summer's humid destruction.

For some reason it makes me think of the hundreds of dead horseshoe crabs at Lewes last month, for whom the overly warm water probably proved lethal. They lay in ragged rows just beyond the water line, like dead soldiers, on their backs, their eight legs pulled up and folded inside their huge carapaces as if they had died in pain. Perhaps it was not the heat, but an epidemic of some sort. Or a bad storm at sea which washed them onto the shore and flipped them over, halting any balanced progress back out to sea. Their huge, dark-brown, foot-square shells cannot be overlooked. Even in death they emit the organic smell of the elephant house at the zoo.

But my dead cicada has no odor and only a short, unprotected body. Furthermore, it seems to have died alone, on the deck, not of an epidemic as human beings are now dying, but of some solitary, private affliction.

I set the dead insect on the top of a speaker for my radio. It now lies next to the dried body of a huge moth, a piece of driftwood gnarled into an odd beauty by the sea, and a small yellow butterfly, its wings folded rigidly in death.

I keep such things. Why? They are rarely perfect, whole specimens and I know little or nothing about their life history or the calamity that brought them to their end. Do I put them on my speaker to remind me of the arid end of things? Of our human curiosity about endings? The cruelty of existence that ends in rigidity? As
Time
magazine in its old, curiously inverted style might have written: knows God.

Heraclitus: ‘All is flux.'

Another section of the manuscript of
The Habit
comes back to me in this morning's mail. The pain of rejection is heavy and dispiriting. This time the editor, the same one who did such a masterful job of line-editing
Chamber Music
, writes that the book seems ‘more willed than felt.' Meaning, I take it, that I
needed
to write this story without being able to convey the emotion it should contain. Or perhaps, that I had not felt it first, or that it had no emotion to start with. I don't know what to think. When one's work is rejected one would prefer to believe the editor is wrongheaded, or blind, or prejudiced, or just plain stupid. But I know none of these are true of Faith Sale, who published my favorite among my novels,
The Missing Person
, although at the time hardly a soul alive seemed to agree with her estimate, and mine, of the book.