Shelter in Place (22 page)

I
t was 1992. Very cold, very clear. A Sunday morning. At last, we'd accepted my father's invitation to worship and now we walked from our house to his, and then down to the water, past the tourist bureau, Nick's Knacks, the harbor with most of the slips empty, the fishing boats already out to sea.

A couple of guys smoking outside The Clam Shack. Wool beanies, Mariners caps, Carhartt coats. It was blowing hard and we leaned into it just slightly as we went. Any word we spoke was whipped away. He'd explained the rules.

“You sit. You wait. You listen for God. And if you feel compelled, you may speak. But it is unnecessary, and most of us don't.”

We walked the gravel path to the meetinghouse door and I remember the relief of stepping inside—the warmth, the sudden stillness, the protection from the wind, which strained hard against the unstained glass.

“God is in the wind above all,” my father said. “Invisible. Delivering all things.” 

So he believed. So he claimed.

There was that far-off howling and the water moving against the rocks. It was a single room. Modest. Unadorned. Wooden pews. A single silver cross.

“Peace is in God and in his world,” my father the new Quaker told us before he opened the door.

I liked being with Tess on one side and him on the other. I liked the sounds of the water, and the panes bending, and the stillness of all those other people.

I liked the winter light carving into the room.

That day they were rioting in Los Angeles. The city was on fire, while the three of us sat together in the quiet meetinghouse—Tess on one side, my father on the other.

We sat and we listened and we were waiting for God. That was the edict.

Near the end, I turned and looked at my father. He sat upright, his long torso very straight. Eyes closed. His hands were folded in his lap, like a debutante's. I saw him then in some new way and felt an abrupt surge of love. He was a man who fought, who refused everything he abhorred—violence, indifference. He would let none of it seep in. And whatever we call it—honor, character, integrity—was what I saw in his new posture, with his thick, scarred old hands resting there so delicately.

There is nothing much else to recall.

We sat and we waited and when an hour had passed we rose and we left.

We were quiet and calm on the walk home along the water and when we said goodbye in front of my father's open door, I hugged him with an uncharacteristic strength and intensity.

He said, “I love you, Joe.”

And I said, “I love you, too.”

Tess kissed him on the cheek.

“And
I
love you, Richard.”

She laughed as if it were an obvious and unnecessary thing to say, took my hand and we walked away from him, turning the corner and heading up the hill.

We were going to Lester's for a pizza and a pitcher. I could feel the swelling brightness, but it had not, for a change, arrived from nowhere and without explanation. It came from Tess, and from my father, from the stillness of that hour, from the light and the gulls, from the peace of our stroll along the waterfront. Perhaps it also came from love. Or
was
love, that sharpness, that general, nameless pleasure. But there was also in that admixture of causes, relief.

I believed that something had changed in Tess. That the joy I felt—and yes, maybe joy is the right word for these rushes, these swells of confidence and clarity—was in part to do with the belief that Tess had changed, that she might have abandoned her plans.

That I'd been freed from the duties of revolt, the duties of war.

But at Lester's sitting in my father's booth, a pitcher of Olympia between us, waiting for our pizza, Tess said, “Do you think a woman should live like that?”

And then my nameless pleasure was replaced by disappointment.

I did not know her plans precisely. And perhaps Tess didn't know them herself.

Even so they were inevitable.

I don't know if we continued speaking. We must have. But what I remember is her gaze on me and her question and that feeling of defeat, that rise of fear.

T
he winter light carving into the room.

This line has been humming in my mind now for days and I realize suddenly it is not mine.

I have stolen it from a poem Tess loved, which she found at Left Bank Books, a little place around the corner from our first apartment in Seattle. It was a shop she adored, her favorite in the city.

The book she found by accident. Something about its title. Something about its cover of red volcanoes. She brought it home and fell for its longest poem. For months she read pieces of it to me.

Tess in bed facing the bay, and me with my back to the windows listening, watching her full of daylight.

I haven't thought of it for a long time, but those words,
light carving into the room
, I see that they've infiltrated me:

 

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,

I am thinking as I stride over the moor.

As a rule after lunch mother has a nap

 

and I go out to walk.

The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April

carve into me with knives of light.

 

I only remembered the last two lines. I had to search out the rest. There it was on our wide bookcase—a slim file of time. On the title page she's written,
Tess Wolff. Seattle, Washington. November, 1995.

The same year they murdered Yitzhak Rabin.

The same year the Mariners lost the pennant to the Seated Men. The year three American soldiers kidnapped, beat, and raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan school girl.

It's the same year they blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

These things were on her mind in 1995. They are in her notes in the book's back pages, pages soft with use.

I'll keep it on the table, and maybe read it all later. I can't now. Her asterisks, her lines are like the light. They carve into me, and I don't have the heart for it today.

I don't have the strength to feel the softness of those pages, which somehow are the softness of Tess Wolff in 1995.

Not only, of course.

That wasn't all she had.

Not all softness.

And looking at that stanza in front of me now I think I should have paid more attention.  

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner
.

Beneath which she's drawn a long black line. Thick and steady.

We were autodidacts in our way. Both of us having squandered our educations in a safe haze of disinterest, going along, half-reading, half-listening, skipping classes. Almost from the moment we met, we regretted it together. Our shared experience of wasted opportunity. Even in Cannon Beach that summer we were reading, listening to music, trying make up for the shame of laziness, of wasting those four years in our respective colleges.

Loving Tess made me hungry for everything and I want to believe that it was the same for her.

That what we were together was a single insatiable beast.

What do you think? Can two people become one voracious animal?

Well, I'll tell you this: For a long time, we were so hungry.

Speak of the drifting mind.

It's that to see this book twenty years worn, to remember Tess reading it in our fresh new bed with the bay outside and us exhausted and frightened and on fire, how can you expect me not to drift?

Just think of us then as a single insatiable beast.

There is no courage without fear.

And us two, we were a brave animal.

There was nothing we would not eat.

The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April/carve into me with knives of light.

As does the rest of the world. Sometimes I think that's the advantage of these failing filters. They prevent me from dying. These broken parts are weapons against numbness, against anesthesia.

I won't ever go cold.

I will die the other way.

I will die with fire, goddamn it.

T
ess can go to hell. I cleaned up a bit. Showered and shaved for the first time in weeks. I can't remember the last time. Last year, she bought me one of those ridiculous razors with twenty-seven blades per cartridge, each designed by the defense department and coated with liquid diamonds or some bullshit. Still, the thing cuts tight and then there was my face, slowly reappearing, stroke by stroke. Gliding again, I had the high concentration, and dissolved the beard, nearly all hard white, quadrant by quadrant, until my skin on a thumb's downstroke was smooth as an oiled plum. It took ten years off and brought more light to my eyes, which, on top of the crackling lightning storm in my gut and in my knees, were already blazing. Just shaving with those razors, the perfect geometric system of it, the straight line at each sideburn flawlessly aligned, all of it providing me the flying confidence of another time, and off I went into the cold evening taking with me one of Tess's sanded walking sticks leaning against our front door. Fuck her. Walked to town, rakish as a slick pirate with my smooth face and queen's scepter, 501s and work boots, favorite faded flannel, defying the cold, unafraid of the speeding buildings at my back, carrying our forests to the sea, knowing it would be the trucks, the madmen and the trees to suffer. Went to The Alibi certain I'd find the farmer's daughter, waited with my Beam rocks humming at the bar alongside two guys drinking Bud longnecks not saying a word, drooping over their stools like dough wrapped in denim, the black Naugahyde pads invisible beneath them, but she never showed. Not a woman to be found for all the hours I sat there drinking, rapping my knuckles against the wood in rhythm to whatever they played on the jukebox—Patsy Cline to Pearl Jam and back again. One of the doughboys gave my hand a sidelong look or two and I thought please try me, give me any reason at all and I'll tear you both to shreds, but they gave me no reason, left after a while, and then it was just me until the place closed down. When they were gone I missed those two fat men and wished I'd had something to say to them. I left the scepter, walked home on our side of the road looking straight into the blinding white eyes of those screaming animals racing towards me, and all the way back I was trying to remember where I'd put my father's ammo box.

T
oday the morning sunlight was flashing through our bedroom windows and in it I saw my mother. She was sitting on the front step of our house in Capitol Hill peeling apples and watching Claire and me. We were children dancing in the sprinkler. A Rain Bird. I don't know how the name returns, or where it's stored, but there it is. A Rain Bird attached to the hose and there's my mother when she was young, and us two in that summer afternoon light.

Do you remember that summer, Mom? The feeling of that cool concrete step against your legs. Watching us through the spray. Did you know, even then, all that time ago, what you were capable of, what was kept within you?

See how that awful black weight creeping through my lungs can provoke such a joyous film, such gentle images. See how that projector finally pulled me from bed.

Its light was cutting my eyes, and crisscrossing through my skull, and the noise and strobing was no longer endurable and I had to escape it.

So I found a way out of bed and into the shower and into my clothes and out onto the road. I recall none of that. Not my feet on the ground, not the water, neither my belt nor these shirt buttons in my fingers.

First there was the film, and then I was walking along the road again with my hair wet, and the pine wind cooling my burning brain. It was a nice, calm middle ground. Not like the night before, not like the morning. I came to the diner and bought a paper and a glazed donut and sat outside. I was hoping I might find the black-haired woman there, early for breakfast before the market. But no luck.

There was an article in the paper about Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who killed himself a few days before. It was John Le Carré who wrote it and he said the world had been “too bright for him to handle.” That Hoffman had to either “screw up his eyes or be dazzled to death.”

I tore that paragraph out and brought it home in my pocket. Maybe you either squint or you die. But really I don't think he was dazzled to death. I think he died squinting. In my experience, that's what heroin and all the rest is for. It replaces the broken filters. It prevents the trees and the sky from carving into you.

Tess and I smoked it twice and shot it once that first year in Seattle. No shortage of heroin in Belltown then. At the beginning of our American Dream, all I had to do was lean out the window. I won't go on about it except to say that its softness, the protection it provided me from my own mind, was terrifying in its warm pleasure. If not for Tess, I'm not sure I'd have ever stopped.

So I will tell you that I understand. I will tell you just how easy it would be. How reasonable. It makes such sense to me. And I don't think there's any shame in it, either.

Not the drugs, and not the suicide.

If you have a broken system, maybe it's either squint or die.

I
don't know how many times we'd been back to see the Trampoline Girl, and I don't know how many times Tess had risen from our bed and gone alone into the early dark.

We could no longer go walking after dinner without feeling the planetary pull of that house on Vista. What for me was dread was some other thing for her.

But it doesn't matter.

Dread or not, the result is the same.

There were nights we found nothing but lightless windows and there were nights we found her bouncing on the trampoline with no sign of the professor. “Hello, Boyfriend. Hi, Tess,” Anna said, and laughed as if she were fully a child.

There were nights she bounced expressionless through the screaming and we looked on, imagining ourselves silent guardians, in loco parentis.