Truck (16 page)

After decades under the clamp, some of the rubber has congealed to the pipework, and I have to cut the hoses away with a utility knife and
nippers. When they've all been detached, I start loosening the studs that hold the radiator in place. I drop one and it rolls off somewhere. When I can't find it, I make a note of it and continue. I get all but one stud loose. The last one snaps off and we might have been hung up, but Mark blows it out with the plasma cutter and the radiator is free. We lift it out, then lift out the shroud and cowling, and I put the radiator in the back of my car. There's a guy a few miles up the road from my house with a radiator repair business. I'll take it to him.

I work all day, get home real late, and still haven't packed for New York.

It's 2
A.M.
before I make St. Paul, where I crash on a friend's couch after ordering a taxi to pick me up three hours from now. As I drift off I have a vision of Anneliese and Amy sleeping in their dark house so many miles from here. Before I get back from New York, they will fly to Colorado to visit Amy's father for two weeks. I will join them for the second week. I am wondering how Amy's father and I will circle each other. I am told he drives a Subaru wagon. I think about Harley and how he taught me to get out there for recess even if I am scared. We'll see how it goes.

In the trees above my garden the squirrels sleep, dreaming their evil squirrel dreams.

I
N JULY, EVEN
the lamest garden gets rolling, and I should be at home weeding. But I am in New York on business (a euphemism meaning
keep your receipts
), taking meetings with editors and agents and assistants—strange shadowy figures who for the other 360 days of the year exist only in the form of e-mail addresses or voices on the telephone. During particularly lean junctures in my career, the thought has crossed my mind that these people don't exist at all, and someone in a cubicle somewhere is having a very good time with me. It is reassuring then, during my infrequent visits, to see them manifest, an added benefit being, when in physical form they pick up the check for lunch. Being from the country, I used to bumble and stumble and demur, but now I have learned that the only polite thing to say is, Well, the asparagus soup with wild mushrooms and truffle foam looks good.

First chance I get, I go for a run in Central Park, out around the reservoir. There are so many other runners, I feel like I'm doing a marathon. There is always someone faster than you, and always someone you can aim for and pick off. When I pass the little old lady in the powder pink workout suit I don't pump my fist or anything, but I find it helps the pace. When I am done, I walk awhile, through the tree-covered paths that wind up and down through the rocks and past statues. The heavy leaf cover mutes the noise of the city. For twenty minutes I sit on a bench with a view of the Manhattan skyline. A couple on a blanket in the grass makes me remember the shape of Anneliese in my arms. She is in
Colorado now, spending time with Amy and Amy's father, Dan. Dan has married, and he and his wife Marie have a little boy. Amy has a chance to play big sister. A few days after I go home from New York, I'm headed out there. From everything I hear, he is a good man, but I can't imagine it's going to be a day at the playground for either us.

Back at the hotel, I check my e-mail and find a message from Anneliese. They have made it safely, all is well. While I'm online, I dial up the local paper so I can read Snook Ruud's obituary. For eighty years, Snook has been a fixture in my hometown. He was a shopkeeper, a butcher, a veteran, and an indefatigable raconteur, although if you were fool enough to trot out a term like that in his presence he would chortle and say, “More like a damn
liar
!” But he had that gift, where the stories just tumbled, and the old buildings rose again, and the village repopulated, and he could put you right on Main Street when it was all dust and Model-T tracks. Snook died just before I left for New York, and I am sorry to miss his funeral. Before departing, I wrote a brief note to the family and dropped it off with Bob the One-Eyed Beagle. He has agreed to hand-deliver it at the wake. Thirty years ago, Bob apprenticed under Snook. I imagine you can still see it in the way Bob slings a quarter of beef. I know you can still hear it in the way he tells a story. The old man was dear to him.

 

I navigate the subway, catch cabs, go to my meetings, and am taken to dinner. At Julian Alonzo's Brasserie 8½, I hold the menu with my knuckles because my cuticles still bear traces of grease from the last session in Mark's shop. I choose Cassoulet of Baby Clams and Roasted Loin of Rabbit from the prix fixe, in part because the rabbit comes with braised leeks, and the odds of my own leeks ever hitting the pan are dwindling in a forest of weeds as I sit here spooning up Peach and Blueberry Financier with Lemon Crème Fraiche.

I have one piece of New York business that is strictly personal. It is a pilgrimage of sorts. In an attempt to discover why photographs in the
International Light-Duty Series
sales brochure leave me wistful as a lovelorn schoolboy, I intend to hike over to the Whitney Museum of American Art for a chance to stand face-to-face with my favorite lonesome painting—Edward Hopper's
Seven A.M.

I am no sort of art expert. I have only been to the Whitney once before, on a previous business visit that coincided with the Biennial. I enjoyed great swaths of that, although I was tempted to leave a note for several of the artists that said, “Great Start!” I would write it in crayon and add a smiley face so as not to seem rude. And I just do not have the patience for video installations, having yet to encounter one that conveys the absurdity of the human situation more effectively than a night spent channel surfing in a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Rapid City. But I like to look at everything.

I understand that
Seven A.M.
is not Hopper's most famous work. That would be
Nighthawks,
a stark existentialist portrait featuring a counterman and three patrons—two men and a woman—frozen in the timeless white light of an all-night diner. Perhaps you've seen the copycat version of
Nighthawks
featuring Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Elvis. The original
Nighthawks
resides in Chicago, and maybe (having never seen it in any form other than a reproduction) I am not giving it a fair shake, but as iconic and lonely-making as it is, I find it overpopulated. Superficially speaking,
Seven A.M.
depicts nothing more than an empty small-town storefront. But the first time I saw it—during that previous Whitney visit—my heart ached and I longed to crawl through the frame. I have done some reading since then, and know now that this was Hopper's ineffable thing, but I am happy to let him do it to me, and I have been waiting for a chance to stand before that painting one more time.

The
International Light-Duty Series
brochure is a twenty-page center-stapled full-color affair highlighting the L-110, L-120, and L-130 series. Published in 1950, it features gorgeous photos of nine truck models available in the series. The L-120 on the cover is identical to mine except for the color; in this case Apache Yellow. The palm fronds in the background are reflecting white light and appear slightly blurred, as if they are being pushed about by a sirocco. Perhaps the blurring is just a trick of poor printing, as some of the color separations are a hair off, but the taller shrubberies too appear as if they are bent by hot wind. Most of the photographs are taken at or around noon, with each truck standing atop its shadow like a place mat. The one exception—a Valen
cia Orange L-120 with a 127-inch wheelbase and stake body flatbed—is photographed on the gravel of a Midwestern farmyard. The photo is very closely cropped—you can see just a portion of one whitewashed brick outbuilding, a few square feet of the board-and-batten barn siding, half an open mow door, and no landscape at all—but based on the angle of the light, you can tell that the morning dew is still burning off. You can sense the coolness that remains in the air and the wetness of the grass that fringes the barn there where the white paint is blue in full shadow. In all the other photos, the meridian sun shows up only as a white glint along this or that convexity; beyond that the truck bodies reflect nothing more than color. On the orange flatbed, the horizon is visible in the door panel, and while the specifics are abstracted by the curve of the steel, the demarcation where dark meets light is sharp. You can imagine somewhere in the dark lower half of the door the cows dispersing to graze having given their morning's milk. The wind is yet to rise, and you can hear the farmer's boots on the driveway gravel as he turns away from the truck with a bag of feed over one shoulder. And when I look at that picture, everything I feel is,
I want to be there
.

 

My walk to the Whitney takes me from mid-Manhattan, along the edge of Central Park, and into the East Side. The temperature today is in the high 80s, and the city is a swelter of activity. The fortresses overlooking the park are always a suggestive mystery, what with you being so close and yet so far, and I can't help but wonder what is going on behind each wall. If the cornflakes are stored in a sterling silver canister similar to the one discreetly shrouding the toilet paper and if mistakes are ever made.

Once inside the museum I go up the stairs and straight to
Seven A.M.,
place myself square before it, and just look. The sweet, sad pull is immediate. I dwell in it for a while, marveling at the trick that is being played on me, and not caring that it is a trick. I have been thinking about this painting for a long time now, and intend to soak it up.

The white squared-off building dominates the right-hand two-thirds of the canvas, cutting sharply against the forest that stands darkly to the background of the left-hand third. The plate-glass storefront is framed in
tall white pilasters, and the outermost pilaster, the one fixing the corner nearest the trees, seems to bow out slightly. Perhaps it is a trick of the eye, but the impression is that the forest—bladed back from the building and viewed across a tan scrape—is exerting a vertical gravity. That the whole building is fighting the force of its arboreal roots. The forest is not at all inviting, and renders the building entirely alien, which, in the course of things, it is. Here in the age of the 'burb, we can infer that this forest, too, will be bladed back, its bulk and gloom nothing against the clacketyclack of the dozer, but implicit in its ominous primordial hue is the idea that man may impose flat planes and square corners on the earth, but entropy favors the organic form, and photosynthesis will win in the end.

The unsettling forest ballasts the painting with mortality, which only heightens the keen pining I feel for what it would be like to sit on a wooden chair alone in the room there on the second floor, the one with the wall of robin's egg blue. I grew up in buildings like this, and I know the feel of that lath and plaster wall, its coolness and solidity, the way your knuckle raps it solid, the way that sort of wall lends the room a sturdy echo, none of your brittle drywall skittishness. I can imagine looking through the window down to the street, the thin sheet of glass warping the view a bit the way old glass does. What I get is the sense of waiting, of stillness, and how it feels those times you rise with the sun and find yourself apparently in sole possession of the world.

Certainly some of what we've got going here is your garden-variety nostalgia. I read an article recently that said in round figures people have been gazing backward for ten thousand years. I am looking at
Seven A.M.
and longing for Harry Abrahamson's old country store as it still stood when I was a tot in New Auburn; I am looking at the picture in the truck brochure and remembering my own father hoisting feed bags. But I get the same helpless pang from the most disparate sources. The outro on Dwight Yoakam's version of “Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues”; a stone fence in Wales; the pale wallpaper in Oscar's apartment in reruns of
The Odd Couple;
the smell of tinder-dry pine needles warmed by the sun; the first notes of Liszt's
Liebestraum no. 3 in A-flat,
not that I would recognize the rest of it if I heard it in the dentist's office. Perhaps a better example is Marvin Gaye's “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).”
The atmospherics and Marvin's smooth angry voice make me wistful for a hot afternoon in 1971, which, given the context of the song and my rural white-boy roots, is on the face of it ridiculous. One velvety green spire of skunk cabbage alongside some airport runway and I hanker to trip lightly through the cowpies behind Daddy's red barn, where skunk cabbage stood in for the cactus of my cowboy books.

Not all the neural paths fire in such obvious sequence. The first time I saw those sun-blasted palms backdropping the yellow International, I thought immediately of chase scenes in
The Rockford Files
. I got hooked on reruns when I was in college. The theme music, the ongoing answering machine joke, Jim's put-upon wit, the way he ran like a stove-up exjock, I am fond of the whole package. But whenever he is in flight or in pursuit, my eye is drawn past the Pontiac Firebird into the background where California lies apparently lazy and hot beneath a sun whiter than the one we know here in Wisconsin, and beyond the set I see the new highways and the bare hillsides and I think of the subdivisions and teeming engines to come, and I become petulant over the fact that I can't wander in there. Never mind that the series was shot between 1974 and 1980 and we're hardly talking garden of the Hesperides. It's not about the preservation or the loss. It is that I have been cheated of that place in that moment. This is something beyond nostalgia and verging on
saudade,
a Portuguese word I first encountered in a Jim Harrison essay in which he spoke of obtuse sentimentality, childish melancholy, and a sense of life irretrievably lost.

I see Hopper's white clapboards and I know exactly how their paint will smell in the afternoon sun. Inside the blue room, I can imagine the seashell silence. If I understand Roland Barthes correctly, this is an example of
studium
—the attention we give a photograph because it contains elements that interest because of our accumulated personal experience and tastes. Shiny old trucks, gravel farmyards, a bag of feed. But Barthes also spoke of
punctum,
that part of the photograph that triggers something beyond simple recognition. Punctum is that element that arouses more ineffable emotions. In an essay bridging painting and photography, Peter Schjeldahl referred to punctum as a “quotient of inaccessible pastness,” which seems right on the money. All the senses
evoke,
but visual images take you a step further. The visual image tells your heart, someone has actually
captured
this place, this space, and it is so close you can touch it, but access is blocked by the surface of the painting, a wall forbidding us to pass beyond our three dimensions. Barring the appearance of Mary Poppins, we are stuck here in the Whitney. But the real power of Hopper for me is that he has addressed the universe, saying,
Stop!
And it has.

 

Before I depart New York, my editor takes me to lunch at the Monkey Bar. I become uncomfortable with the stares of the men in the four-figure suits, to say nothing of their companions: women apparently obtained on lease from some photo shoot intended to advertise a perfume the scent of which I can never quite place, although I suspect it is bottled in a slim decanter of frosted glass to which is affixed an embossed platinum label reading
Utterly Unattainable, Homeboy
. We were having the Roast Butternut Squash Soup and Seared Rare Tuna on a Bed of Steamed Spinach with Shaved Ginger and Plum Sauce. “Don't worry,” my editor said to me sitting there in my Kmart socks and overworn T-shirt. “You've got it backwards. They're all trying to figure out just Who You Are that you got in here dressed like that. Act like you're Bruce Springsteen's favorite roadie.” Sometimes these big-city people can be down home in ways that shame all your burnished small-town fables.