Copyright

4th Estate

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www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Joseph O’Neill 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © Getty Images/Peter Chadwick

Joseph O’Neill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008283995

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008284015

Version: 2018-04-26

Dedication

To Gill Coleridge and to David McCormick

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Pardon Edward Snowden

The Trusted Traveler

The World of Cheese

The Referees

Promises, Promises

The Death of Billy Joel

Ponchos

The Poltroon Husband

Goose

The Mustache in 2010

The Sinking of the Houston

About the Author

Also by Joseph O’Neill

About the Publisher

Pardon Edward Snowden

The poet Mark McCain received an e-mail, which had been sent to numerous American poets, inviting him to sign a “poetition” requesting President Barack H. Obama to pardon Edward Snowden. The request took the form of a poem written by Merrill Jensen, a writer whom Mark knew to be twenty-eight years old, a full nine years his junior. The poem-petition rhymed “Snowden” with “pardon.” And “pardon” with “Rose Garden.” And “Rose Garden” with “nation.” And “nation” with “Eden.” It rhymed—or, as Mark preferred to put it, it echoed—“Putin” and “boot in” and “Clinton” and “no disputing.” “Russia” echoed “USA”; and “USA” “Thoreau”; and “Thoreau” “hero.”

Mark forwarded the e-mail to the poet E. W. West. He wrote:

Am I crazy to find this enraging?

Within seconds Liz wrote back:

No.

They arranged to have coffee that afternoon.

In preparation for the meeting, Mark tried to organize his thoughts. His first point, of course, was that the very idea of poem as petition was misconceived. A poem was first and last a Ding an sich. It definitely wasn’t a message that boiled down to a single political-humanitarian demand. It made no sense for an agreeing multitude, or mob, to undersign a poem: you could no more agree with a poem than with a tree, even if you’d written it. Of course, the signers of the poetition would argue that they were associating themselves with the text’s petitionary substance and not with its formal properties; and that in any case poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes its scabbard. But, accepting all that, Mark mentally counterclaimed, why not just have a petition in the form of a petition? Why drag the poem into the muck? Because, the undersigned might reply, a versified petition was likely to attract more attention and be more consequential than the alternative. To which Mark would answer, The good of poetry resides not in the—

He began to feel a familiar dialectical dizziness. He set off to meet his friend, even though it meant that he would get there twenty minutes early.

Liz was waiting for him when he arrived.

They hugged. The moment they took their seats, Liz said, “Well, are you going to sign it?”

Mark said, “I don’t know. Are you?”

Liz said, “Not my problem. Nobody’s asked me to.”

Mark paused. This was a complexity he ought to have foreseen. With extravagant bitterness, he said, “Oh, they’ll rope you in.”

Liz mused, “I did a reading with Merrill in January.”

Mark had attended the event, as Liz well knew. “I felt bad for him,” he told her. “You really showed him up. Without meaning to, of course.” He went on, “Look, I do think this thing is chaotic. They’re basically shooting out e-mails at random. And I don’t think Merrill is a vengeful, petty guy. Far from it. I think his heart’s in the right place. Ish. But you know what? I could be wrong. He’s obviously interested in a certain kind of success.” Mark stopped there and was glad he had, even though he loathed Merrill Jensen. Whenever he bad-mouthed a colleague, however justifiably, he regretted it. (Strange, just how draining an effort of tact was required to get through the day without bad-mouthing another poet.) In this instance, he felt, he hadn’t thrown Merrill Jensen under the bus. He’d dissed him only in order to express solidarity with Liz, and only to that extent.

Liz doubted that Merrill had overlooked her because she’d shown him up at their reading; in all probability, Merrill’s recollection was that he’d shown her up. No, she had been overlooked because she was a woman. Whenever a stand needed to be taken and the attention of the public had to be endured, the peacocks huffed and squawked to the fore, idiotically iridescent.

She decided to say, “We need people like Merrill. Somebody’s got to be interested in being prominent. Otherwise we’d all disappear.”

Mark said, “I expect Dylan has been contacted.”

Liz laughed. The singer’s Nobel Prize in Literature had bothered her, yes. Literature was in the first place reading matter, after all, and Dylan’s lyrics were mostly unreadable—and not even listenable to without the music. Even his supposedly best stuff would be torn apart if presented to the poetry practicum she taught every Tuesday, not only on account of its wordy, clichéd, hyperactive figuration but, more fundamentally, because of the soothsaying persona that the singer so readily deployed, a move that worked fine in a pop song but on paper came off as a shtick. All that said, Liz had not taken the news as a personal hit. Mark, though, in common with many men of the pen she knew, had been knocked flat. For two days he could not bring himself to leave his apartment or even to post on Facebook. Only after this period of grieving had he managed to discuss the matter with Liz, at the very table where they now sat. At that meeting, Mark revealed that the night before he’d found himself thinking back to the seventeen-year-old who, wandering the public library of Forsyth, Missouri, inexplicably leafed through a tattered Norton Anthology and for the first time came truly face-to-face with a poem’s mysterious verb-visage. He still remembered the one that did it for him—Roethke’s “The Waking,” funnily enough. So take the lively air, / And, lovely, learn by going where to go, he recited to Liz. And that was the moment he’d set off on a delightful clueless journey in language, and for years he never once felt lonely or even singular, because at all times he felt this breeze, he said to Liz, on which the poems he would read and write might be accepted and held firmly aloft, and the air of the culture seemed filled with such breezes and such poems. Yes, Liz said, I know exactly what you mean. Frank O’Hara did it for me, she said. Which one? Mark asked. Liz said, “Animals,” to which Mark replied, We didn’t need speedometers / we could manage cocktails out of ice and water, and Liz wanted to hug her friend. Anyhow, Mark continued, the damn thing is, it’s so hard to keep believing. And there’s so much you need to believe in. Does that make sense to you? It does, Liz said. Mark said, You become aware that what you’re doing is almost nothing. That it’s just a few atoms away from nothing. And now, with this scandal, I feel that what we do is in fact nothing. I feel like it’s officially nothing. Liz saw that Mark had other things he’d planned to say but was too emotional to speak. Liz, they’re calling him a poet, he finally got out. You know? They’re not calling him a novelist. They’re not calling him a songwriter. They’re saying he’s a poet, Liz. I know, sweetie, Liz had said.

“Seems like he’s finally accepted the honor,” she now stated.

Mark said, “Of course he accepted it. A guy with that much vanity? He was always going to accept it.”

He didn’t tell Liz that, during the couple of weeks that Dylan had not responded to the news of his award, Mark had hoped that the singer would tell the Swedish buffoons where to stick it; that Bob had the integrity to recognize that an ultra-celebrated multimillionaire who deals in concerts and extra-paginal iconicity is not playing the same game as a writer who sits down in a small college town and, with no prospect of meaningful financial reward, tries to come up with a handful of words that will, unless something untoward should happen, be read by a maximum of a hundred and forty people and be properly appreciated by maybe fifty-two of these, of whom maybe six will be influenced. Make that two. Once a year a small beam of honor, reflected all the way from Stockholm, faintly brightened the dim endeavors of such writers. And now even this glimmer had been removed from their small and dark corner of the sky and tossed like a trinket into Bob Dylan’s personal constellation.

This sidereal imagery made Mark uneasy—stars were almost always cheesy; doubly cheesy, in the context of a “pop star”—but he had nothing else. Language was hard. And poetry, he’d always felt, was language at its hardest.

He had recently expressed this point of view to his friend Jarvis, a writer of short-form fiction. Jarvis said, “Really? Poetry is hard, sure. But good prose is just as hard, man.”

“Poets can generally do what prose writers do,” Mark, a little drunk, declared. “The reverse? Not so much.”

A day later, he received an e-mail from Jarvis with a poem attached:

Easy Peasy

It seems that what’s

Keeping what is as it is, the whole thing thing, is physics, whatever

That is. Let’s see: the fizz of the river, l’hiver, that Swiss

Watch thing. Liver.

Every frisson, everything that’s

Alive or that was once aliver. The leaf. The leaver.

He forwarded it to Liz:

What do you think?

She wrote back:

So great that you’re writing again! This is good—best thing you’ve done in a while. So effortless. “Physics” and “fizz” is a pleasure. And don’t think I haven’t noticed that the English-language contractions erase “i” and “u.” In a poem drowning in materialism, that’s just such a smart, playful way to raise the issue of subjectivity.

Mark didn’t get back to Liz. Or to Jarvis.

Re the Dylan Nobel, Liz said, “It’s depressing. I can’t separate it from the Trump phenomenon.”

The election was a week away.

“Yes,” Mark said. “And hypercapitalism, too. The reader as consumer. It’s an interesting question.”

He kept secret, even from Liz, the fact that he’d already written on this question. It was a secret because what he’d written wasn’t a poem. For some months, Mark had worked surreptitiously, and exclusively, on a series of prose reflections that he termed “pensées.”

How doable pensées were! The most difficult thing about making a poem, in Mark’s judgment, was figuring out the text’s relation to its own knowledge; figuring out, to quote from Liz’s one anthologized work, the poem’s “claim to saying.” There was no such problem with a pensée: you wrote as a know-all. Apparently—and here, Nietzsche and Cioran and above all Adorno were Mark’s masters—the trick was to simply put to one side all epistemological difficulties and just steam ahead into the realm of assertion and opinion and emphasis. Boy, it felt good. With great gusto Mark had knocked out, apropos of the hypercapitalistic reader:

As class-based submissiveness justly evaporates, appropriate deference—to expertise, rationality, and even data—also disappears.

This results from a state of affairs in which one’s autonomy consists primarily in a freedom to consume. Objective realities are inspected like supermarket apples and accepted only if they tickle the fancy. If they don’t, it’s not sufficient merely to reject the apple. The apple tree itself must be cut down. And then the orchard. Hell hath no fury like a consumer inconvenienced.

In this way, shopping is confused with resistance; a bogus egalitarianism prevails; a vicious man-on-the-streetism becomes dominant. The tricoteuses make their return, clicking not needles but touchpads. Need one add that the poem is the first to be dragged to the guillotine?

Who knew that writing this stuff would be such fun? The voice—at once pedantic and forceful, and strangely aged and pampered—was the most fun of all. It was the voice of the short-tempered Central European professor whose wife’s principal domestic project is to ensure that her husband enjoys peace and quiet in his study.

Mark had not had a wife or a study in six years. Liz and he became close during the chaos of his divorce, when he was outed as a cuckold and outed from his house. His male friends, he was a little shocked to learn, were ineffectual, indiscreet, and bizarrely merciless confidants. Liz listened to him sympathetically—and honestly, too. When Mark said to her, I was blindsided, Liz said, Yeah, maybe, and he said, What do you mean, maybe? and Liz said, Quarterbacks are blindsided. You weren’t blindsided. You were myopic.

Liz’s criticism of Mark’s poetry was similarly sensitive and forthright, and he was very grateful for it and happy to reciprocate. Her work wasn’t right up his alley—it was a little too academic and sexual—but there was no querying its intelligence and carefulness. In any case, Mark mistrusted his own alley, which at this point, as he’d once remarked to Liz, was overrun by the rats of resentment. And the cats of confusion, Liz suggested. Not to mention the dogs of disillusionment.

If Mark envied Liz at all, it was for the growing kudos that E. W. West enjoyed as a writer who disturbed edifices of gender and sexuality. But it wasn’t Liz’s fault that her biologically and culturally determined homoerotic inclinations were now in vogue, just as it could hardly be held against her that she’d grown up in bourgeois luxury on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Liz often complained to Mark about finding herself in Virginia, a dislocation that she experienced, as any reader of her “Sappho in Sicily” quickly grasped, as an exile.) Nor did he hold it against Liz that, in an unpublicized complication of her biographical profile, she was for the first time romantically involved with a man. His name was Pickett, apparently as a tribute to Wilson Pickett. Did anyone call their children after poets anymore? Mark doubted that there’d ever be a kid named McCain out there in the world. Or, if there would, the kid would certainly be named for the political weasel John McCain. Mark had long felt defamed by this echo.

Every word is a prejudice, Nietzsche famously points out. One might add: Every word prejudices. Nowhere is this truer than in the nominal realm. One’s name cannot be separated from one’s good name.

He cared deeply for Liz and was her biggest fan and cheerleader. He felt bad that she had not been contacted about the Snowden poetition.

“So what should I do?” he asked her. “Sign it? Rewrite it?”

“Ah,” Liz said. “The patriarch’s quandary.”

Mark did the work of smiling sympathetically. He saw that Liz was peeved, and hurt, and with good cause. The problematic situation of women was not to be underestimated, not that Liz was in danger of committing this error. In her most recent sonnet, “mandate” had been displaced by the neologism “womandate.” Now Liz was, as she liked to say, lady-pissed. Mark totally got it.

But in the meantime he had a problem of his own, and an itch to explore the problem in writing. They had finished their coffees and their refills. It was time to go.

The two friends stepped outside. It was a lovely November afternoon. They hugged and separately went off.

As soon as he got back to his apartment, he wrote:

We attribute to Bertrand Russell the following notion, that to acquire immunity from eloquence is of utmost importance for citizens of a democracy. We are curious about the notion because Stevens was. And we connect Russell’s statement, thanks to Denis Donoghue, to this one, by Locke: “I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind, since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred.”

If we grant Russell’s words a merely provisional validity, we can ask: What is a verse petition if not fallacious eloquence? What is poetry if not a riposte to the forces of fallaciousness? What are these forces if not power’s language?

Mark wondered if he should explain that, by “fallacy,” Locke meant “deception.” He decided not to. The reader would connect the dots.

Not for the first time, Mark asked himself who this notional reader was. He had never, not once, met a disinterested party who had even heard of his poetry, never mind read any of it. Maybe his pensées would gain him a reader he could physically touch.

He felt a wavelet of nausea. The feeling had a certain etymological justice: he had jumped from one ship to another. But what was the alternative? To write nothing? It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry.

Mark wrote:

How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.

Then:

Sometimes I sit down to write and feel the internal presence of … bad faith. Therefore I desist from writing. On the other hand, what would it mean to write in good faith? That sounds even more suspect.

He ate a cheese sandwich with mustard and olive oil. That was dinner. He went to his armchair. He wrote:

It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.

Now it was dark out. Usually the poet would read a book, but tonight he lacked the wherewithal. He opened a can of beer and went online. For a while he skipped from one site to another. Everything was either about the election or not about the election. He checked his e-mail. Nothing new. Then he went onto Facebook, then back to skipping around the Internet. He found himself reading, without interest but with close attention, about persimmon farmers in Florida. He rechecked his e-mail. Hello, Merrill had written him again.

Actually, Merrill had written Merrill—Mark had been bcc’d. The e-mail brought “exciting news”: funding had been secured (from whom, Merrill didn’t say) to buy half a page in the Times for the poetition. This moves the needle, Merrill stated.

Mark’s reaction involved three thoughts. One: “Move the needle”? Two: What an operator Merrill Jensen was. What a maestro of fallacy. Mark knew for a fact that Merrill not only disliked Bob Dylan’s lyrics but also disliked Bob Dylan’s songs, which he’d once sneeringly characterized to Mark, who did like them, as “Pops’ music.” But sure enough, the minute the Nobel was announced, the prick was at the forefront of the congratulators and imprimatur-givers, arguing that Bob Dylan was an unacknowledged legislator of the world; ergo, Bob Dylan was a poet. It made Mark want to puke: the pseudo-reasoning, so right-wing in its dishonesty; and the big lie that Dylan somehow lacked acknowledgment. The big truth, not that anyone dared to speak it, was that Shelley’s dictum needed to be revised. Poets were the unacknowledged poets of the world.

Had Mark been among the scores of writers contacted by the media for their reaction to the prize—which he hadn’t been—he would have spoken up for his comrades in verse. He would have faced down the wrathful online barbarians who vilified any perceived anti-Dylanite. (Their favorite disparagement, tellingly, was to accuse one of being a “nobody.”) He would have stated:

The status of poet is not to be worn like one of those fine ceremonial gowns sported by recipients of honorary degrees for a single, sunny, glorious afternoon. Not even by Bob Dylan. If there is such a thing as a poet’s mantle, it is a $4.99 plastic poncho: useless for fashion but good in the rain and the cold. And in an emergency.

His third thought about Merrill’s e-mail was that his name had never appeared in the Times and that if he signed the poetition it would.

His apartment was on the third floor of a Victorian only minimally maintained by its owner. There was a bedroom and a kitchen–living room equipped with an armchair, a desk, a desk lamp, a small sofa, and bookcases that entirely covered two walls. No television. The kitchen-living room had two windows. When Mark wanted to pace about the apartment, his one option was to walk to and from these windows. This he now did.

It was a journey that he’d made thousands of times, and thousands of times he had viewed the shingled rooftops of the houses across the street, and beyond them, in the town’s small business district, two brown glassy towers. At night, you couldn’t see much beyond the glare of the streetlight directly in front of the window. And yet evidently there was an inextinguishable need to approach an opening built into a wall for air and light, and to look through it.

Somebody down there was walking a dog. That was a poem, right there: the master, the leash, the joyful dog, etc. But the territory had been covered. There was that Nemerov poem, just for starters; and the one by Heather McHugh with that all-time-great dog line—doctor of crotches. A poem by Mark McCain would be water poured into a vessel that was already full: superfluous.

He kept looking, which was another poem—a poem about the peculiar percipience of the one who gazes out a window. The poem would do for the window what theorists had done for the threshold: it would offer the idea of the fenestral as a consort to the idea of the liminal. He wouldn’t write it. The automatic metaphoric associativity of “the window” was just too much. He could always play with the associations, of course. But surely there had to be better things to do than play with the associations of “the window.”

He returned to his chair and wrote, in less than half an hour, a poem that deviated from his previous work. The poem masqueraded as notes for a possible poem. It was titled “Meditation on What It Means to Write?” It read:

Problem: “meditation on” is a cliché. “What it means to” is a cliché.

The very notion of a problem, colon, is a cliché.

“The very notion of” is a cliché.

“Cliché” strikes one as a cliché.

As does “strikes one.”

And “As does.”

Ditto inverted commas.

Ditto “ditto.”

He did not write Merrill back. He did not put his name to the poetition.

As soon as he had not done these things, he rose up from his chair. He went not to the window but to the area between the chair and sofa. He stood there with hands balled into shaking fists. Silently and exultantly he roared, Never give in. Never not resist.

The Trusted Traveler

For almost a decade, Chris and I have received an annual visit from one of my former students, Jack Bail. This year is different. When, as usual, he e-mails to invite himself over, I reply that “our traditional dinner” can “alas” no longer take place: six months ago, Christine and I moved to Nova Scotia.

Jack Bail writes back:

Nova Scotia? Canada’s Ocean Playground? I’m there, Doc. Just say when and where.

“Oh no,” Chris says. “I’m so sorry, love.”

It’s I who should say sorry to Chris. Not only will she have to cook for Jack Bail but she will also have to handle Jack Bail, because, even though I’m supposedly the one who’s Jack Bail’s friend, it’s Chris who retains the details of Jack Bail’s life story and the details of what transpired in the course of our meals with him, and who is able to follow what Jack Bail is saying or feeling. For some reason, almost anything that has to do with Jack Bail is beyond my grasp. I can’t even remember having taught anybody named Jack Bail.

“And I guess Chris will be coming,” Chris says, confusingly. “His wife,” Chris says.

Of course—Jack Bail’s wife, like my Chris, is a Chris by way of Christine. Which is irritating.

I say, “You never know. Maybe he won’t be able to make it.”

Chris laughs, as well she might. Jack Bail always turns up. Without fail he marks the end of the tax season by eating at our table. It is always a strangely fictional few hours. Only after Jack Bail has left does our life again feel factual.

Chris’s long-standing opinion on the Jack Bail situation is that I should effectively communicate to him that I don’t wish to see him. It’s not her suggestion that I socially fire him in writing—as she acknowledges, “That’s pretty much psychologically impossible”—but that I make use of the well-understood convention of e-mail silence.

I’ve tried it. E-mail silence only prompts Jack Bail to switch to pushy text messages. For example:

Hi about this dinner thing. Just let me know details as soon as you have them, no rush.

This obdurate memorandum and others like it—

Dinner this month? Next month? All good:)

—weigh on me so heavily that in the end it’s just easier to spend an evening with the guy. The truth isn’t so much that Jack Bail is a terrible or unbearable fellow but that Jack Bail falls squarely into the category of people whom Chris and I really don’t want to see anymore as we hit our mid-sixties and apprehend the finitude and irreversibility of human time as an all-too-vivid personal actuality and not as a literary theme to be discussed in high school classes devoted to The Count of Monte Cristo or The Old Man and the Sea. A central purpose of moving to this Canadian coastal hilltop has been to shed our skins as New Yorkers and finally rid ourselves of the purely dutiful associations that, it seemed to me especially, overcrowded our day-to-day existences, which, even discounting work, apparently amounted to one interaction after another with individuals who demanded that we transfer our time to them, often for no better reason than that our paths had once crossed or, would you believe it, that their very demand for our time constituted such a crossing of paths.

(Illustration: A, who claims to be a friend of a friend, informs me by e-mail that he’s thinking of applying for a job at the school where Chris and I teach. Could he pick my brains over coffee? Further illustration: B writes to Chris to say that her child once attended the school. Could Chris help B get an overseas research fellowship? Exercising what is, I believe, a universally accepted right to reasonable personal autonomy, we choose not to answer these approaches; whereupon, we find out, both A and B tell people that we’re rude, selfish, full of ourselves, etc. In A’s and B’s minds, their making unilateral contact with us means that we, the contactees, are somehow in their debt. The difference between Chris and me is that she doesn’t let this stuff get to her, whereas I stupidly waste a lot of time and emotion being bothered by the ridiculous injustice and hostility of it all.)

I won’t even begin to describe how many hours and years we devoted to the parental body—the Hydra, as Chris named it. You cannot defeat the Hydra. You can only flee it. None of this is to say that we’re refugees; but it can’t be denied that we’ve retired, and that to retire means to draw back, as if from battle.

The good news is Jack and Chris Bail will not be sleeping over. My Chris took it upon herself to warn Jack Bail and his Chris that there was no room at our inn, so to speak, to which Jack Bail responded:

No worries.

We’ll take him at his word. The other good news is that Ed and Fran Joyce, new Nova Scotia acquaintances, will join us for the dinner in order to absorb the Bails, although of course the Joyces aren’t aware that this is part of their function. We don’t know the Joyces at all well, but they strike us as good sports. Also, they hosted a kind of welcome event for us, and so we owe them dinner, arguably: one day soon after we arrived, a hamper filled with good things was left at our front door, together with an invitation to join members of “the community” for drinks and nibbles. We freely accepted the invitation—we hadn’t come here to be recluses, after all—and enjoyed the occasion, although we were, and still are, a little wary of and astonished by and ironical about the prospect of joining a retiree crowd. Our plan is to have a year of contemplative idleness, after which we’ll have a better idea of what to next get up to. We’re far from elderly, after all. Time is not yet a victorious enemy.

Shortly before everyone is due to turn up, Chris and I take to the deck and get a head start on the wine, which is white and cold. “I wonder what Jack will have to say about this place,” Chris says. “Yes,” I say. “That’s something to look forward to.” She has reminded me of Jack Bail’s chronic amazement at our old apartment in Hudson Heights. Every time he came over, from Brooklyn, he would say something like, Hudson Heights? Who knew this neighborhood even existed? Who lives up here? Oboe players? It’s like I’m in Bucharest or something. Should I buy here?

This kind of thing is all fine, needless to say, and absolutely within my tolerance levels in relation to schoolchildren, although of course Jack Bail, who must be in his late thirties, and if memory serves is balding, is no longer a schoolboy. But his personal qualities are beside the point. The point is that Jack Bail is uncalled-for.

It’s a mild, semi-sunny, slightly windy June evening. “Just look at that,” I declare for about the millionth time since we moved into our cottage, which offers a panorama of a pond, green seaside hills, a semicircular bay, and a sandbar—or spit, perhaps. To the south, there’s a wooded headland that may or may not be a tombolo. It’s my intention to investigate this vista systematically, since it feels strange to look out every day and basically not understand what I’m looking at. Right now, for example, I’m observing an extraordinary horizontal triplex: in the offing, a distinctly ultramarine strip of ocean water is topped by a dull-blue band of unclassifiable vapor, itself topped by a purely white stratum of cloud. Then comes sky-blue air and, almost on top of our own hill, an enormous hovering gray cloud. This outlandish hydroatmospheric pileup, which is surely not unknown to science, leaves me at a terminological and informational loss that’s only intensified when I look at the bay itself, where the migrant and moody skylight, together with the action of the wind and current, I suppose, and maybe differences in the water’s depth and salinity, constantly pattern and texture and streak the aquatic surface. It’s unpredictable and beautiful. Sometimes the bay, usually blue or gray, is thoroughly brown, other times it has Caribbean swirls of aquamarine or is colorlessly pale, and invariably there are areas where the water is ruffled, and there are smooth or smoother areas of water, and areas that are relatively dark and light, and dull and brilliant, and so forth, ever more complexly. There must be some field of learning that can help me to better appreciate these phenomena.

“The Salty Rose,” Chris says. “For the Lunenburg whaling years.”

“Not bad at all,” I say.

This is one of our favorite running jokes: Chris suggests titles for the memoirs that I am not writing about the lives that we have not led. In this subjunctive world we are adventurers, spies, honorary consuls, nomads, millionaires. The Hammocks of Chilmark describes our summers on the Vineyard. Our Corfu stint is the subject of a trilogy: The Owl in the Jasmine; A Pamplemousse for the Captain; and Who Shall Water the Bougainvillea?

We have never set foot on Corfu or Martha’s Vineyard. Other than a four-year spell in Athens, Ohio, our thirty-one-year-old marriage and thirty-two-year teaching careers, and almost all of our vacations, have unfolded in and around the schools and streets of New York, New York. Jack Bail claims to have been in my class at Athens High, which is confounding. I have a pretty good recall of those Athens kids.

“Goddamn it.”

Chris: “Leg-bug?”

I pick it off my ankle and, because these lentil-sized spider-like little fuckers are tough, I crush and recrush it between the bottom of my glass and my armrest. I call them leg-bugs because these last couple of weeks every time I’ve set foot outdoors I’ve caught them crawling up my legs—to what end, I don’t know; they’re up to no good, you can bet—and because I can’t entomologically identify them. They’re certainly maddening. Often my shin prickles when there’s nothing there.

“Here they are,” Chris says.

Our guests have arrived simultaneously, in two cars. Fran and Ed get out of their red pickup and Jack Bail gets out of his rented Hyundai. There’s no sign of his Chris.

Dispensing with the steps, Jack Bail strides directly onto the deck. He’s extraordinarily tall, maybe six foot six. Has he grown?

“Adirondack chairs,” Jack Bail says. “Of course.”

As the young visitor who has gone to great lengths, Jack Bail is the object of solicitousness. There’s no way around this: once Jack Bail has traveled all the way from New York, he must be received with proportionate hospitality. “Jack first,” Fran says, when I try to pour her a glass of wine. “He deserves it, after his voyage.”

“The flight was great,” Jack Bail says. “Newark airport—less so.” Ed says, “You might want to think about the Trusted Traveler program. Might speed things along.” “I am a Trusted Traveler,” Jack Bail says. “It did me no good. Not at Newark.” “What happens if you’re a Trusted Traveler?” Chris says. Ed says, “You don’t have to take your shoes off.” We all laugh. Jack Bail exclaims, “They made me take my shoes off!” We all laugh again. Ed asks Jack Bail, “Which program you with? NEXUS?” “Global Entry,” Jack Bail says. Looking at Fran, Ed says, “That’s what I’m all about. Global entry.” That gets the biggest, or the politest, laugh of all.

Soon we’re eating grilled haddock, asparagus, and field greens. “Delicious,” Jack Bail is the first to say. “Thank you, Jack,” Chris says, with what seems like real gratitude. Jack Bail inspects the ocean, parts of which are ruddy and other parts dark blue. “That’s some view, Doc,” Jack Bail says. “Well, it’s not Hudson Heights,” I say. “I thought you lived in Manhattan?” Fran says. “Hudson Heights is in Manhattan,” I say. Ed says, “‘Doc,’ eh? You’re a dark horse.” “That’s what they called me,” I declare heartily. I didn’t invent the custom of recognizing a teacher’s academic title. Ed continues, “How about you, Jack? You a doc, too?” Jack laughs. “No way, man. I’m just a CPA.” “‘Just’?” Fran says, as if outraged. “You must be very proud of this young man,” she tells me, and this is a tiny bit infuriating, because I don’t like to receive instruction on how I ought to feel. How proud I am or am not of Jack Bail is for me to decide. “Certainly,” I say, Mr. Very Hearty all over again. Fran says, “How was he in the classroom? A rascal, I’ll bet.” I make a sort of ho-ho-ho, and Jack Bail says to Fran, “Hey, don’t blow my cover!” He adds, “Doc was a great teacher.” I say, “Well, we’ve come a long way from Ohio,” and Ed says, “We’ve all come a long way, eh?” and he tells Jack Bail that he’s from B.C. but that Fran is a Maritimer and Maritimer women always return home eventually and you’d have to be crazy to stand in the way of a Maritimer woman.

Fran says very attentively, “Your wife can’t be with us, Jack?”

“No, Chris is not able to come,” Jack Bail says.

“Maybe next time,” Fran says. Chris somehow catches my eye without looking at me and somehow rolls her eyes without rolling them. Or so I imagine.

“Unfortunately we’re currently separated,” Jack Bail says.

This gives everyone pause. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ed says. Jack Bail says, “Yep, it’s not an ideal situation.”

Now Chris gets up and says, “We have assorted berries, and we have—chocolate cake. Jack’s favorite.”

“Do you have children, Jack?” Fran asks, which is surely a question whose answer she can figure out by herself. “We don’t,” Jack Bail says. “A couple of years back, we tried. You know, the IVF thing. Didn’t work out.” I’m refreshing the tableware at this point. Jack Bail says, “As a matter of fact, I just got this letter from the clinic demanding nine hundred dollars for my sperm.”

This silences even the Joyces.

Jack Bail continues, “So three years ago, as part of the whole process, we froze sperm. Yeah, so anyway, we go through the whole thing, an ordeal I guess you could call it, and this and that happens, and we forget all about the frozen sperm. Now here’s this invoice for nine hundred bucks because they’ve stored it all this time—or so they say. I call them up. I speak to a lady. The lady says they’ve sent letters every year informing me that they’re holding my sample. Letters? I don’t remember any letters. But first things first, right? Destroy it, I tell her. Get rid of it right away. She tells me that they can’t do that. First they need a notarized semen disposition statement.”

“OK, here we go,” Chris says. “Jack’s cake. And berries for anyone who might be interested.”

“Now, I know their game,” Jack Bail says. “I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to mail them the notarized statement and they’re going to say they never got it. And they’re going to make me go to a notary all over again and they’re going to make me mail them another statement and they’re going to drag this thing out. And every extra day they store it, they’re going to charge more, pro rata. See? They’re literally holding my sperm hostage.”

“Corporations,” Ed says. “Fran, doesn’t that—”

“Exactly,” Jack Bail says. “It’s not that the employees are evildoers. It’s the corporate systems. When it comes to receiving mail they don’t want to get, mail that reduces their profits, their systems are chaotic. When it comes to billing you, their systems are never chaotic. And I mean: retaining my genetic material without my consent? It’s insanely wrong. So—do you ever do this?—I tell her I’m an attorney and that I’ve got a bunch of hungry young associates who’ll be all over this shakedown like a pack of wolves.”

Ed says, “That would blow up in your face in Canada. We’re—”

“In the U.S. it’s different. In the U.S., you don’t register on their systems unless you threaten a lawsuit. That’s how they operate. Human reasonableness is just seen as an opening to make more money. So I said to Chris, Do you recall us ever getting a letter about a frozen sperm sample? She’s like, I don’t know, all those letters look the same. I’m like, Wait a minute, this is important, I want you to think hard. She’s like, I can’t do this, I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball. I’m like, What ball? This is the ball. I mean, think about it. My genes are in the hands of strangers. Never mind the nine hundred bucks. We’re talking about my seed. For all I know, I could have children out there in the world right now. Offspring. It’s far from impossible, right? Mistakes happen all the time. And foul play. People think that foul play doesn’t really exist. They’re wrong. Foul play is a very real thing, especially when there’s money to be made. Believe me, I know.”

Nobody has made a start on the cake or the assorted berries. I say to Jack Bail, “You’re right to be concerned. You have to take care of this.”

“That’s what I did, Doc. Cut a long story short, I caved on the nine hundred bucks and I went to the clinic personally with the documentation. I made sure to get a receipt.”

“That was smart,” Chris says.

Jack Bail says, “I had no option: I got a letter from a debt collection agency. I had to cave. What was I going to do, risk my credit over nine hundred bucks? No, I had to cave. And I don’t even know if they’ve actually disposed of the semen. I’ve got to assume they have. But I’ll never know for sure, will I?”

Jack Bail spends the night on our sofa. In the morning, when Chris and I go down, there is a thank-you note.

Then a year passes and with it a tax season, and we are walking on the beach, and I stop and I say to Chris, “You know what? We haven’t heard from Jack Bail.”

Our beach is a sand and shingle beach. The sand is a common blend of quartz and feldspar. The sand emerges from the ocean, so to speak, and continues inland until quite suddenly shingle replaces it. The shingle, or gravel, consists at first of pebbles, next of a mixture of pebbles and cobbles, and finally almost only of cobbles. This progressive distribution of the beach stones, apparently methodical, is in fact natural: a storm’s waves will force rocks small and large landward, but retreating waves have less power and will move only smaller rocks seaward. The result is a graduated stranding of the rocks, which amass in a succession of steep slopes and berms. Our beach walk begins by scrambling down one berm and then a second, and I always take care to hold Chris’s hand as we go down. Countless large spiders somehow make a life among the cobbles, and my job is to help Chris to put them out of her mind. Out of my mind, too. There are no leg-bugs out here. Leg-bugs are deer ticks. Every evening from May through November, Chris and I must examine each other for ticks. Sometimes we find one.

From the sand beach, the brown drumlin cliffs are exposed to our contemplation. The drumlins have been here since the Wisconsin glaciation. Their crosscut formation is the result of erosion by the ocean and the wind and the rain, a battering that is ongoing, I can testify after two winters here. As the hills retreat, they leave behind rock fragments that will, in due course, form part of the beach. This sort of fact is difficult for me to really understand; it must be said that much of my newly acquired geological knowledge is basically vocabularistic. I can’t recognize feldspar, for example, or a granitic boulder. The Wisconsin glaciation isn’t something I’m really on top of.

Chris and I scan the water, instinctively, I suppose. Sometimes we’ll see a seal’s head. It disappears for a while, then surfaces once more. They have large, cheerful, dog-like heads, these seals. It would feel good to see our warm-blooded kin out there today: this is one of those strolls when the up-close ocean daunts me more than a little, and as we skirt dainty rushes of water, I sense myself situated at the edge of an infinite and relentless eraser. I’m not sure that there’s much to be done about this: awe, dread, wonder, and feelings of asymmetry come with the terrain. There must be something appealing about it, or we’d be elsewhere. Where, though? It’s places that are going places. This part of Nova Scotia, the paleogeographers tell us, was once attached to Morocco.

“I hope he’s OK,” I say to Chris.

“I imagine he is,” she says. She says, “You could always call him.”

Yes, I could call him. But where would it end? I have taught, I once calculated, almost two thousand children.

No seal today. We keep walking. Chris says, “The Last Fez.”

I say, “About the Constantinople mission? We were sworn to silence about that.”

Chris says, “Remember that night we crossed the Bosporus? With that surly boatman?”

“Ali the boatman?” I say. “How could I forget?”

The World of Cheese

It had never occurred to Breda Morrissey that things might go seriously wrong between herself and her son, Patrick. But back in the fall he had declared her “persona non grata”—his actual expression—and pronounced that she was no longer permitted to have contact with her grandson, Joshua, on the grounds that she would be “an evil influence.” It was a crazy, almost unbelievable turn of events, and all about such a strange matter—a scrap of skin.

Patrick disputed this. “This is not about skin, Mom,” he said during the first session of the mother-son therapy they jointly underwent in New York. “Can’t you see? That’s not what this is about.”

Breda turned to the therapist, Dr. Goldstein—Dan, her son called him—for help. But Dr. Goldstein, whose dramatic beard and small pointy nose gave him, Breda thought, the look of a TV judge, was regarding her so severely that Breda was silenced.

Breda’s reliving of this moment, as she sat in a window seat on the flight back to California, was interrupted by a nudge—a barge, almost—from her neighbor. This person was an obese woman of Breda’s own age, mid-fifties, who from moment one had been tangling and fidgeting with carry-on luggage and safety instruction documents and in-flight entertainment gadgets. “Sorry,” the woman breathed, continuing her struggle with the wires of her earphones. At the woman’s other elbow, in the aisle seat, sat a littler person in a red sweater, a man. When drinks were served, the fat woman, as Breda thought of her, wordlessly helped herself to the little man’s mini-pretzels packet. Breda understood with revulsion that they were a couple.

She looked out the window. An immense cloud floor covered the bottom of the void. Brilliant stacks of white vapor rose here and there, and pink haze lay beneath the blue upper atmosphere. It was a glorious, otherworldly spectacle of the kind that Breda, when she was a girl, would have found suggestive of winged horses and unknown realms; but what it came down to, when you grew up and looked through it all, Breda thought, was rain, rain falling on the fields and the forests and the houses and the people.

Breda kept gazing out. Something about the bumpy spread of cloud reminded her of cottage cheese, which in turn reminded her: Patrick had developed an interest in, as he put it, the world of cheese. During her stay, her son had each evening approached the dinner table with a cheeseboard, making bugling and fanfare noises. “Try this one, Mom,” he said, pointing to one of the half-eaten, slightly stinking varieties, and Breda, who wondered whether these foodstuffs were legal, took a mouthful. “Nice,” she said, refraining from any other comment—for example, that Patrick was obviously gaining weight as a result of his new hobby—for fear of provoking another outburst on his part. (And of course his wife, Judith, would no doubt be touchy, too. Everybody was touchy these days.) One night, Patrick announced that he and Judith and baby Joshua were taking a cheesing trip to Ireland. The plan was to go to the Kinsale International Gourmet Festival and then to drive from farmhouse to farmhouse, tasting semisoft rind-washed cheeses. “I’m not interested in hard cheeses,” her son said importantly. If they found the time, he said, they’d drive up to County Limerick and maybe look up whoever was left of the ancestral Morrissey family.

“That’ll be nice,” Breda said.

In the early seventies, she and Patrick’s father, Tommy, had taken the kids to a wonderful-sounding but actually sour-looking village near the Shannon River, and had met remote Morrissey cousins of his, amorphous types who led unimaginable existences in cheap modern homes at the edge of the village and were nonplussed by their visitors. As she looked down at the clouds, Breda recalled two big things about that trip: it had rained the whole time, and everywhere they ran into people named Ryan. “It’s raining Ryans,” Tommy joked. “It’s Ryaning hard.”

Tommy, who a week after Patrick’s wedding quit his biotech job and ran away to Costa Rica with the German woman. Packing his bags, he was the wronged furious one. “You make me feel like I’m vermin,” he said, scrunching into his suitcase underpants Breda had just ironed. “With Ute I can bring up anything, absolutely anything. I can be anything. Jesus, I never knew what it was to feel alive. To think I’ve wasted all these years being made to feel a jerk, a creep. You want to know what we talked about last night? We talked about cunts I have known. Cunts I have known. How they smell differently, how they’re shaped differently, how they behave differently. Including your cunt. Oh yes. Do you know how special that is? Do you realize the level of trust and intimacy that takes?” On and on he went, appalling her. He began to shout. “Remember when I was alone in the Ukraine? All alone in that goddamn hotel and I get on the phone to my wife, my fucking wife, my one and only partner till death do us fucking part, and I asked you to say something for me, something with feeling, something that might connect us, anything at all. I’m not telling you to scrub floors or stick your hand in a pile of shit. I’m not ordering you to do anything. I’m asking. I’m begging for a sentence or two, that’s all, just a few words, words a husband is entitled to expect from his wife. What do I get? Nothing! ‘You know I don’t do that kind of thing, Tommy.’ That kind of thing? I’m howling for a drink in the fucking desert and you give me that shit? Well, fuck you, you uptight daddy’s girl.”

Breda was reexperiencing this horrifying episode because something about her son’s recent harangues had put her in mind of his father.

As for the daddy’s girl taunt, that went back forty years, to 1967, the year Breda traveled to Notre Dame for Tommy’s graduation. Notre Dame was so Catholic and male that people on campus mistook her for a nun. After the ceremony, she and Tommy—they’d met six months before, at a wedding in Newport—set off on a cross-country drive to San Francisco. The plan was to return east in the fall so that Breda herself could start college. She started to feel sick just west of the Indiana border. At first she thought it was the weed they’d been smoking, or maybe carsickness, but by the time they reached Missouri she knew she was pregnant. To celebrate, she and Tommy drove on to Reno and got married. When Breda rang home, her father answered the phone. He was a Boston lawyer. He found the whole thing—the trip to California, the jokey shotgun wedding, the long-distance pay phone shenanigans, the premarital sex—shocking. “Goddamn punk bullshit,” he said, and hung up with a sob. When Breda tearfully redialed, her mother answered. “You’ll have to forgive your father, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s just that these things have consequences. Maybe that’s something you can’t really understand at your age.”

Breda patched things up with her parents, who came to see that she had married Tommy out of a sense of responsibility and not out of romantic whimsy. “It’s a wonderful thing,” Dad said when she became a mother. “And you’re a wonderful girl.”

Siobhan was born in the spring of 1968. Patrick came along two years later, named by Tommy for his father even though, to hear Tommy tell it, Grandpa Pat had barely acknowledged his own son. “He’d treat you like you’d treat a dog: ruffle your hair, take you for a walk in Van Cortlandt Park.” This conversation took place one night soon after her father-in-law’s death in 1975, when Tommy and she lay in the darkness of their Santa Barbara bedroom. “The best thing about Dad was he was a terrific whistler,” Tommy whispered. “Oh, Jesus, he could whistle. He’d stick a thumb or pinkie in his mouth and shoot out this real earsplitter. He stopped taxis like they do in the movies.” Tommy, shifting on his side, said, “You ever hear me whistle?”

“I think so,” Breda said. “Sure.”

“He taught me,” Tommy said in a low voice. “He taught me how, Breda.” His shoulder started to tremble, and Breda touched it.

Grandpa Pat was a New Yorker and passed his last years in a Midtown residential hotel. After his death they found his room filled with pepper shakers and salt shakers taken from the diners and bars in which he’d whiled away his days. Tommy displayed the shakers on a shelf at home. “Some families inherit sterling silver, others stolen restaurant utensils,” he said. Later he asked Breda to box away the shakers because they made him think of the sands of time and depressed the hell out of him.

After Tommy disappeared to Costa Rica, Breda stayed put in the matrimonial home in Santa Barbara, unclear about where things stood. When it became apparent that her husband wasn’t returning, she sold up and moved into an apartment in Atherton to be near Siobhan. Siobhan had urged the move. But within a year, Siobhan and her family headed east to Alexandria, Virginia. “Well, that’s how it goes, I guess,” Breda said when her daughter broke the news. “If you have to go, you have to go.” Breda stayed in Atherton, working as an administrator for a medical practice. She took a weekly (and straightforward and pleasant) call from her son, and a biweekly (and difficult and tetchy) call from her daughter. Inevitably the latter put her through to the grandchildren. She called their names down the line and listened for a response. “Talk to Grandma,” an adult instructed in the background. Then a child’s voice, small and stubborn and distinct: “Don’t want to.”

From time to time, her children brought back news from the Switzerland of Central America, as Costa Rica was apparently known. It was so humid down there, Breda learned, that a paperback would practically rot overnight. It was also amazing. There were monkeys and colored birds and sloths and waterfalls and rocky beaches. Tommy, who had never been interested in the Californian ocean, allegedly took up surfing. There was a story that he’d saved a woman from being drowned, which Breda found hard to believe. More plausibly, he became a nature guide. He led groups into the forest and pointed out birds and termite hills. He had one trick, Patrick said, where he swung his machete into the bark of a tree, and sap—was it rubber?—came oozing out. When the hike was over, he took the surfers and ecotourists and movie stars (apparently Tommy had rubbed shoulders with Woody Harrelson) for a bite to eat at the Crazy Toucan, which was the restaurant owned by the German woman. Patrick showed his mother snapshots of a wooden house with colored lights strung across the front porch. “See? That’s where the bar is, right there. That outbuilding, that’s the kitchen.” “Nice,” Breda said. “And there’s Ute, with the blonde hair. She’s a great cook. Fusion food.” He pronounced the woman’s name Ootah, as if he were an expert on Germany.

“Fusion food,” Breda said. “Sounds good.”

Breda and Tommy did not divorce. For a time, Breda was unsure which was worse: the mortification of divorce or the mortification of being so forgotten about that one’s husband could not even bother to place one’s breakup on a proper legal footing. Then Breda came to think, What difference does it really make, in the end? This question, she discovered, was increasingly applicable to a lot of things. It was true, as her mother had once remarked, that the consequentiality of things became clearer as you grew older, so that actions and especially omissions assumed an importance they never used to have; and so one grew more hesitant. But on the other hand it seemed to matter so much less whether you wound up with outcome A or outcome B.

Four years into their marriage, Patrick and Judith bought a house in the Bronx, not far from where Tommy had grown up. They held a housewarming party and Patrick made a big deal of it, insisting Breda fly over. “Bring your boyfriend, Mom,” he joked. His father also turned up, with the German woman. When Breda offered to help out with the refreshments, Patrick said, “Just relax, Mom. Enjoy yourself. Leave the cooking to Ute. It’s what she does for a living.”

For an hour Breda mingled with the young people and played an agonizing game of hide-and-seek with the Costa Ricans. But a conversation with Tommy was inevitable. Emerging from the kitchen, he said jovially, “Hello, Breda.” It was their first conversation since their separation, which also was four years old. He looked quite different. There was a beard and a ponytail, and his hands were cracked and brown. He was heavier, in spite of the surfing and the fusion food. “Good of you to come, Breda,” he said, making her feel like an interloper. They made small talk. Breda noticed that Tommy made repeated use of a new expression. “The roads are kinda funky down there,” he said of Costa Rica; and, “It’s kinda funky meeting up again like this, isn’t it?” No doubt this was beach talk or bar talk or surf talk. He had lost that exact, scientific air she’d once found attractive. A memory suddenly seized her: Tommy’s liking for sniffing and snouting her ass while she took up a position on all fours; even, once, when she was menstruating and blood trickled down her inner thigh. “It’s passion, honey,” he mumbled. “This is passion.”

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