The Other (10 page)

T
HAT NIGHT, WE DRANK
a lot of brandy. Erin, said Jamie, had come to Rome in June on a student visa to take twelve credits of art history. In July, an art-history administrator called Jamie and, in a calm, even assiduous voice, explained that Erin was having psychological difficulties, which at the moment consisted of lying despondently in bed, so now he was making use of the emergency number she’d provided. Jamie understood then that this administrator assumed he was talking to Erin’s mother. She didn’t tell him otherwise. She listened to him explain that the program had a good relationship with a clinic, and that Erin would get care, even on a Sunday. Rome on Sunday was generally quiet, but this clinic was responsive to the program’s requests. Failing that, there was a private home number the administrator could call in order to get around-the-clock attention. This ought to get results, but if it didn’t, he would try a second and a third number. Someone would help Erin, of this he was certain. Rome worked in strange ways, he said, but ultimately Rome worked. It was these protests, Jamie told me in the bar, that tipped the scales in favor of her going to Rome—say all of this hadn’t happened on a Sunday, maybe she would have stayed in Portland and not come to Italy. But it was on a Sunday. Jamie worked in the gift shop of a hotel—on evenings during the school year and for eight-hour shifts since the start of summer—but on Monday she told her manager that she had to quit because of a medical emergency in her family, and on Tuesday she went to a travel agent who helped her get a discounted fare which was nonetheless exorbitant because of short notice. I said I wondered what she’d told her parents.

“That Erin invited me to Rome.”

“That’s all?”

“It was kind of true.”

“How much was your plane ticket?”

“All my savings.”

I told her about my life-insurance money then. I was effusive, in part because I’d been drinking the Monte Sella’s brandy, but I suppose the gates opened for other reasons as well. In the end, I talked too much about myself. I told Jamie that I was going to be a writer. I celebrated train travel. The next day, on the trail—because a trail is good for privacy of thought, even when you’re with other hikers—I felt ashamed of my garrulousness. I was then and am now a believer in reserve, in brevity, and in the value of silence. I once saw a book called
Mouth Open Already a Mistake,
written by someone described on the flap as a Zen master, and though I didn’t thumb its pages, it did seem to me a title describing something I’ve known to be true—
Mouth Open Already a Mistake.
That’s the sort of thing that’s sometimes in advice columns. Even so, my mouth’s been open, at length, every day in my classroom. I’ve made my living opening my mouth. The bell has rung, as a bell rings to start and end the rounds of a boxing match, and I’ve come out with my mouth open. And all the while I’ve privately preferred silence. “The new year’s first snow: / how lucky to remain alone / at my hermitage” is from Basho, who for the most part has bored my World Literature students. That’s a class where we sit on old sofas and discuss, for example, Chinua Achebe. I like these conversations, most of the time, but nevertheless, I often see my life as an effort to thwart dialogue, and just about everything else, so I can be by myself, either by myself or taking, for better or worse, a kind of refuge in Jamie. This may or may not be the best sort of marriage, but it’s partly how ours has unfolded anyway. And I know, because she’s told me, that Jamie takes refuge in me, too, though she doesn’t incline, as I do, toward solitude. If she had her way, our two grown sons would come for dinner every night, and nothing would ever change.

L
AST NIGHT WE BOTH
depressed ourselves a little by renting, and watching, a forgettable movie, one we should have turned off after half an hour in favor of doing something else. A movie like this makes you feel you’re wasting your life watching it, and that’s what happened to us. And yet we watched anyway. Then it was over, and we both felt self-conscious about how we’d spent our evening. Jamie said, “Let’s not do that again; if it’s bad, let’s turn it off next time,” and I agreed with her, though we both knew no principle would guide us in the future. I went up to my garret and checked my e-mail—hoping, I confess, to hear from my agent, Ally Krantz—and then sat in an old club chair, napping. It was the kind of napping where you argue with yourself, for a long time, about getting up to go to bed. Images come in curious procession, punctuated by interludes of clarity, like rising to the surface after being underwater. At last I stood up. I keep a few artifacts and totems on my desk: a spoon one of my sons carved for me in a wood-shop class; a figurine of the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys; a fire-drill set—a charred cedar board and a carved yew-wood stick—that was once John William’s; and a postcard of E. B. White at his typewriter in a shed. These, for whatever reason, caught my late-night attention, and I was struck by how little I noticed them for months on end, despite all the time I spend in this room—these things that are there because they have a private meaning or because they’re meant to induce aesthetic pleasure, all of them only inches away but largely ignored.

I went to bed. But now it was hard to sleep—that’s the problem with late reveries in my club chair—so I thought about the past to pass the time. Around three in the morning, Jamie asked, out of the blue, though it didn’t entirely surprise me, “So what are we going to do with the money?” We talked about that for a long time without deciding. It got light, and after my morning routine—feeding the dog, brewing coffee, stretching a little, and staring out the window—I returned to my garret. At eight, Jamie turned on the water in the shower. I could hear her—even though we were on different floors—hawking spit in the stall and singing with parodic intent. We sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating toast. I thought Jamie looked good in her outfit—just a simple cotton V-neck shirt, short-sleeved, with a wrap skirt and sandals. She’s past fifty; even so, I think she moves through the world looking good to other people, too. Until recently, Jamie had a job appraising real estate, which she didn’t particularly like, but we needed the money. The boys were gone, but we still needed her paycheck. One thing: Jamie and I never argued about money. I’m frugal to a fault and so is she.

Our wedding, twenty-eight years ago, was an agnostic affair, held in a gazebo with our families present and a judge presiding, near formal specimen trees in the Washington Park Arboretum, just a few miles from where we live now. Sometimes, on walks, Jamie and I sit in this gazebo to get out of the rain, maybe looking at a small tree-handbook we carry, with its descriptions of leaves and needles, its pencil drawings and index of Latin names, or warming our hands in our pockets and reading the graffiti penned on the posts; or, at some point, I’ll mention the neuroma in my foot or Jamie the arthritis in her fingers, or, most likely, the two of us will add another segment to our dialogue on how our grown-up sons are faring. You would think that sitting sheltered from the rain in the gazebo where you were married would feel romantic, and it does, but the fact that it feels romantic no longer seems, to either of us, important. We leave that feeling in the background, so—for example—if you were to see us deliberating over jars of pasta sauce at our regular grocery store, the Trader Joe’s at Roosevelt Way and 45th, it wouldn’t occur to you that romance is part of our relationship, and in the same way, it wouldn’t occur to you if you saw us in that gazebo. You would just see a couple at midlife, identifying trees together or talking quietly. You would, I think, barely register our existence on your way to wherever you’re going, just as we hardly noticed other people when we were walking, thirty-two years ago, in the Dolomites.

3

G
ODDESS OF THE
M
OON

O
N A
S
UNDAY
this April, the
Seattle Times
ran a front-page feature, continued, densely, on two inside pages, about me and the hermit of the Hoh. It included a photo, lifted from the ’74 Roosevelt High School annual, in which I’m wearing a black bow tie and a white dinner jacket, a shag haircut, and a mustache, and another of me taken this April on the South Fork of the Hoh, sitting with one leg over the other and gesturing toward the water. I’m described as, among other things, the hermit’s only friend, and it was this, apparently, that prompted a call I got shortly afterward from a Cindy Saperstein.

I didn’t know what to make of her at first. The sentences emitting from the other end of the line were so pell-mell they put me off balance. Was I really John William’s friend? she asked. If so, she wanted to sit down with me, because years ago, she said, she’d been his “flame.”

I said John William had never mentioned any “flame.”

“Okay,” she said. “You’ve been getting weird phone calls since the newspaper thing.”

“No,” I said. “Well, one.”

“This isn’t a weird call. I went with him at Reed. My name’s Cindy Saperstein. Houghton then. I was his girlfriend.”

I considered hanging up. “Come on,” Cindy pleaded, “I
went
with him at Reed. Gnosticism, right? Always talking about the Gnostics? Did he go off with you constantly about the Gnostics?”

“Constantly.”

“So let’s meet.”

W
E CONVERGED
, three days later, on a Starbucks halfway between Seattle and Portland. Since I was unsure about traffic, I beat her there by fifteen minutes, an interval I partly spent watching drivers maneuver to park in an undersized lot, including Cindy in her unwashed Volvo station wagon with its barricading dog-screen and defiant, if moot,
KERRY/EDWARDS
bumper sticker. Why did I dismiss the woman who struggled out of this iconic vehicle with a large sisal handbag and a practical sunhat as not the person I was waiting for? The politics were apropos if I extrapolated forward from Reed in the mid-seventies, and the woman herself was of the right vintage, but it still seemed impossible that this gray-haired Democrat—who’d advised me to look for “a past-her-prime earth mother”—had once been John William’s “flame.”

It was 2 p.m., and Cindy wanted a midsized iced Mocha Frappuccino made with skim milk. I wanted one, too. I think we both enjoyed watching the barista because of the federal case this young woman with a tiny tarnished nose-ring made out of preparing our concoctions—Cindy and I shared middle-aged amusement and middle-aged forbearance, bonding, I thought, by virtue of a generational contrast. At our table, Cindy sipped through her straw, then removed her sunhat with a sweaty flourish. She told me that for years she’d had a landscaping business and still did occasional landscape design, but right now she was writing screenplays. She’d written one, in fact, that had recently been optioned, about an eighteenth-century explorer in Florida “taken in by natives.” Her husband was a CPA and blues pianist. Her college-senior son was working with an NYU chemistry professor on…Cindy didn’t understand it, but it had to do with nanobots. Her college-sophomore son was an exchange student “studying snowboarding” in New Zealand, and her high-school-sophomore daughter, in a humbling surprise of parenthood, was now at cheerleader camp in Idaho.

With this mention of her daughter, Cindy did something girlish—she reached back and laid her hair on her shoulder. When she turned her face to the side, I saw her as she might have been at Reed: as an ingénue painted by Vermeer, maybe with an earlobe poking out of her tresses. “To be frank,” she said, “I called you for a reason. The reason being that after seeing you in the paper I thought we should talk about a screenplay.”

“What?”

“Between the two of us,” she said, “we’ve got a story with juice.”

“No one’s going to make a film about a hermit.”

“Yes, they are,” said Cindy.

S
HE WAS HARD
to stop. And I’d driven for close to two hours. So I sat there while she told me how she’d met John William at a Reed dorm dance and how, in the semidarkness, she’d noticed him long before he asked her to the floor, because he was the type that attracted her—“the boy next door with a dark side.” They danced to “Long Ago and Far Away,” by James Taylor, which in blunt despondency asks, “Where do those golden rainbows end?” and “Why is this song so sad?” and which is so languid it left them, Cindy told me, with no alternative to the “slow dance” mode of the era. This meant dancing very little, or for that matter hardly moving while in one another’s clutches, but it was also, or could be, an intensely pleasant exchange of scents, pressures, hot breath, adjustments of hands, small turns of the head, and noses brushing hair, all of which she experienced while dancing with this handsome, clearly well-bred, but rough-around-the-edges guy who so far had no name and whom she couldn’t remember having seen on campus; but it was only early October of her freshman year, and she hadn’t met a lot of people yet; she had so far, mostly, done a lot of apologizing for being from Aurora, Illinois.

“Long Ago and Far Away” ended. They uncoupled, Cindy with reluctance. The guy she’d danced with didn’t say his name or ask for hers, but he did say, as he stepped back, “Marry me.”

“Okay,” answered Cindy. But she also felt that if this was irony her dance partner had an excellent poker face.