He talked about the discipline of writing and reading. He had theories about how many pages a day were necessary to sustain a long and meaningful work, and how many words must go into the brain (through reading) to fertilize the number
of words that came out in writing, a four hundred to one ratio. He talked about the dangers of academic instruction and the importance of life experience—thoughts that echoed and reinforced my own belief that a writer could become successful in an institutional sense and still have nothing worth saying. He talked about the importance of mental and physical health. We were young still, but we would need to exercise and learn to meditate to produce quality work over the long haul. Rivers himself ran marathons twice a year and practised yoga every day.
There was a silence, as we acknowledged the elephant in the room.
You heard I lost the leg skiing, I suppose, Rivers said.
These were sobering, accusatory words, and we gripped our glasses tighter, careful about jingling the ice.
It’s amazing how people will twist the facts to cut you down.
No shit, Giles said.
I nodded but had nothing to say.
It’s like
The Old Man and the Sea,
Giles said. Those fucking sharks. They were Hemingway’s critics, you know.
This was meant for me. And I could only widen my eyes. The sharks were critics? It seemed bad enough they were sharks.
Hemingway’s fuck-you book, Rivers said.
Goodbye, Hollywood, Giles said. Go to hell, Nobel Prize. Up yours,
Life
magazine.
Rivers leaned back.
What does it take to become a great writer? I’ve thought about that a lot this year. How much of yourself are you willing to give?
Megan stood and took plates into the kitchen; there was nothing too abrupt about her movements but some vibe of disapproval anyway. Rivers watched her and then shrugged as if to say, She doesn’t get it.
Tolstoy fought in a war, Rivers said. Stendhal. Solzhenitsyn got thrown into the gulag for writing a letter criticizing his commanding officer. They wouldn’t give him any paper, so he composed novels in his head. Cervantes fought on a galley and got his hand torn apart by a bullet. He went back to war a year later and fought one-handed. Then his ship sank and he was taken prisoner for five years, and when he got home, they threw him into jail for debt. Instead of killing himself, he wrote about a foolish reader who confuses adventure tales with reality and sets out to live them. In the process, he invented the goddamn novel.
Giles kept our glasses topped. We sipped, we pondered.
Hemingway went to war as an ambulance driver. He got his leg half blown off carrying a wounded soldier on his back. He fell in love with his nurse, and she rejected him—at around the age you are now. Those early experiences were so complex he kept living them out and writing them down for the rest of his life. He was an asshole and a drunk and a braggart, but he reinvented the English language by forcing us to use only the words that really matter. Do you think he could have summoned that kind of courage if he hadn’t understood what suffering and brutality was like?
Conrad was a smuggler and a gunrunner when he was your age. He gambled too much and wasted his fortune. He fell in love with someone who didn’t love him back, so he shot himself in the chest. The bullet went all the way through, and when he
told the story later, he claimed he’d been wounded in a duel. And because he was broke and sick of himself and sick of his own lies, he joined the merchant marine and travelled to some of the worst places in the world, and the only way he could understand what he saw was to write it all down.
Faulkner was a drunk, too, but do you think he could have cracked thought into pieces if he wasn’t playing Russian roulette with alcohol? Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, the madness that infected his best writing, started the day he was lined up before a firing squad and shot with blank rounds. Balzac wanted to write the whole history of human futility and committed suicide through coffee, overwork, and lack of sleep. Joyce worked on the same book for seventeen years and went blind trying to get his words right. Burroughs was a junk addict and a homosexual who didn’t have the courage to buck convention until he shot his wife through the head playing a doped-up game of William Tell. Mailer stabbed one of his six wives with a penknife.
He rolled the bottle on the floor between us until it clunked against the table leg.
They’re right, he said. Writing risks nothing. But something that’s so obsessively engaged in, something that squeezes out its power through brutal concentration and merciless scrutiny and the desperate pursuit of unachievable expectations, takes a complicated toll.
It was after eleven when he asked for help to rise and go to the bathroom. The evening had been mesmerizing, except for the frequent interruption of the telephone. Every so often, it burst with a sharp jangle and Rivers would break off mid-sentence until the answering machine in the bedroom
came on. Bizarrely, the answering message was an Islamic call to prayer, and it went on in full warble for endless seconds, pausing then sounding again, before a hushed voice finally offered the dignified caller a chance to leave a message for Sinbad, sailor of the seven seas.
Megan had not returned from the kitchen. I’d assumed she’d slipped off home, but when I brought the last of the dishes in, I saw her sitting at the breakfast table, nursing a glass of wine, her face drawn and tired. I felt as if I’d intruded on some private intimacy and asked in a quiet voice whether she was all right. She answered only that she’d had a difficult day at the office and wished she could put Rivers to bed.
He’s not well, she added.
I imagine it will take some time to get back to normal.
He hasn’t been the same since.
My mind went to Nietzsche. It was easy to dismiss her concerns as the complaints of the small-minded, to write her off. Rivers had seen and experienced the unspeakable. Now he was sailing over the morality of ordinary men.
But then she said, Delmore thinks a lot of you. He told me he thinks you’re going to be a great writer.
A trembling came over me.
Is that right? I asked.
She didn’t say anything more, just gripped the stem of her wineglass and became submerged in tiredness once again.
Outside,
Giles and I paused to say goodbye to each other.
Jesus, that was insane! Giles grinned. That guy’s fucking nuts!
I was shocked at his betrayal. He’d hung on to every word Rivers said. He was the class star who knew that the sharks were critics. And now he was being dismissive, as though the great man was a homeless ranter at a bus stop. I understood, in that instant, Giles did not truly want to be a writer; he wanted to impress. Still, I didn’t have it in me to call him out on the spot.
Most writers are nuts, I offered lamely.
Not like this fucking guy, Giles said. We’ll be lucky if we get out of his class alive!
I laughed. Like Peter before the cock crowed. Then Giles rode off on his bike and I hoofed it home.
I took the long way around the lake, lifted but disoriented by the thoughts in my head. When I got home, it was after midnight and my parents were sitting in the living room in chairs we never used. I could tell by the aged expressions on their faces that something was wrong. A death, I figured. A diagnosis.
Where have you been? my father asked.
To realize that I was the object of concern unnerved me. For once, I’d been doing something healthy and positive, not the casually demented and evil stuff of a normal fuck-around night. I felt unjustly accused and got self-righteous in my tone.
I told you I was at Professor Rivers’s house for dinner.
It’s so late, my mother said.
I opened my mouth but no words came out. What did time matter? I was almost nineteen years old, going to college, and had just experienced one of the most meaningful evenings of my life.
I’m out this late all the time, I finally said.
But when you are, we know who you’re with.
They meant Chris. They meant that being with Chris was better than being with Rivers. This was so ridiculous, I laughed out loud. Did they have any idea what kind of influence Chris was on me?
We called his house over and over, my mother said, and no one answered. How were we to know what was going on?
I blanched. So it was my parents who’d been calling that whole time? I thought of the messages they must have left, the prim, impatient requests, and felt sickened, too embarrassed to live.
Jesus Christ, I groaned.
In the next instant, my father stepped into me and swung, almost knocking my head off with the palm of his hand. My face blazed with heat and the tears flew to my eyes but I didn’t cry. We stood chest to chest, the anger and adrenalin churning me to bits. I was wild with rage and power, and I realized for the first time in my life that I was bigger than him. I think he realized it too.
You’ve been drinking, he said.
Whisky on my breath.
So? I didn’t bother to defend what didn’t need defending.
What kind of man is … What kind of relationship …
What? I demanded.
He started up again.
Are you …
And he stopped once more, unwilling or unable to go on.
Am I what? I felt too shocked, embarrassed, and persecuted to say anything more articulate.
My father left the room.
A moment later, with all the horror and shame I’d ever felt, I grasped his unasked question. He wanted to know if I was gay. My mother and father thought I’d been ass-fucking all night.
I looked to her for some acknowledgement of the injustice. She’d flown toward us when my father struck me, begging us to stop. But I saw no understanding in her eyes. Like all mothers, she only wanted love and an absence of conflict in her home.
I went to my room.
Are you? My father’s question was a virus that wormed its way through everything Rivers had ever said. His teaching had become contaminated. My elation over his attention had turned toxic.
The next day, I called Chris, so angry my voice shook.
Chris knew how excited I’d been to visit the great writing teacher, and he asked me how the night had gone. I tried to explain what had happened at the end, the embarrassment my parents had caused, the injustice. Unable to articulate the monstrosity of it all, the outrage, I finally blurted it out.
I think my dad thinks I’m a fag.
I couldn’t have admitted that to anyone else. Even opening the door would have been life-threatening.
But Chris only laughed.
He’s just figuring that out? I’ve known it for years.
As usual, it was the perfect thing to say.
My
father is invisible to me now. I’ve blanked him. I no longer remember the presence of him except as a totem of reproach. I remind myself that he was tall and thin, that he enjoyed a drink
or two in the evening, that he went to church every week, usually by himself, that he didn’t like golf but liked tennis and running, that he read history books like they were novels and couldn’t stand it when a war movie got something wrong, and that he dismissed the mysteries and self-help my mother read as nonsense and probably thought the literature I liked was contemptible too. I remember how dutiful he was about work, and how much his sense of the rightness of obligation seemed enhanced by the dullness of a task, and how that futile and dispirited pointlessness suffused what we thought was normal and gave rise to the urge for rebellion. I remember that I loved him, and that I disappointed him, and that to love him was to disappoint him.
And yet, when I think of fathers, I think of Rivers. At some point in life, if we’re lucky, we try to make a clean break and become who we want to become. Around that time, we choose who we want our father to be.
One father wanted me to be reckless, to garner experiences no matter the cost, to be a great writer. The other wanted me to be safe.
I’m not sure Rivers was a good choice, and I’m not sure I followed through sufficiently to find out. And I’m not sure my father wouldn’t have been a better father if I’d let him.
These are the kind of puzzles you spend a lifetime trying to solve.
Susan
was another. Why did I think of her as the one for so long?
Is it because I often caught her looking at me when the four of us, or the three of us, were together?
Is it because she once walked between Chris and I and held our hands, and when it caused us all to laugh with embarrassment and surprise, she let go of mine a breath or two after she let go of his?
Is it because she dared me to kiss her one night when we were both too drunk and Chris had passed out?
Or because she gave me a letter the next day, but pulled it back and ripped it to bits before I could open it, though I could smell the perfume on my hands ever after?
Or because she pretended none of these things happened?
Of all the people I’ve ever known, she was the most unknowable.
I suppose that’s why I’ve been looking for her ever since.
Over
the next month and a half, as the term neared an end, I often felt angry and belligerent, and just as often sick and defeated. It was a nauseating, disorienting, exhausting time in my life.
Chris’s persistent talk of banks was a kind of water torture to my brain, a drip of dread. The only relief came when we were with the girls, because he never talked about bank robbing around anyone else. Even so, my confusion over Susan, the many wrong signals and imagined opportunities, was another irritation. Poor Radha got less from me than she deserved. We were rarely alone, preferring group comfort to our own awkward relationship. This is not to say that our time was joyless. As a foursome, we usually watched videos and ate takeout, laughed hard, and even had many serious and interesting
talks. At some point, on most nights, we split up for a time and hit separate rooms, finding beds if there were no parents home, or pushing back couches and hiding behind them, or even entering closets or bathrooms for briefer encounters. Then we’d gather again with sly comments about carpet burns, hickeys, or pulled muscles. For some reason, some mysterious soreness issue I happily ascribed to my enormous member, Radha and I jerked or even sucked each other off more than we actually fucked, but this was okay by me. I usually thought of Susan as we did it anyway.