I was still full of hate, but I had the sense that a fever had passed. I’d gone through it. My wife and kids were getting ready for bed. Amy was somewhere north of here. Our final moment hadn’t exactly crackled with resolution. I ate another barbecued chicken leg. They discussed the polishing of memories, the skeleton of facts a writer illuminates through feeling. I would do what he did, make something out of nothing. This experience of turmoil and ecstasy deserved my attention and respect.
I had one last night to get through, and one more day with my students. I wanted to eat and head back to the Barn to look over my lecture notes so I’d have something to offer in the morning, although I was in no particular hurry. I was afraid to be alone and knew that when I went back to the Barn it would be worse: it would be quiet, it would be all Amy, everywhere. The kitchen cutting board, the curtains—each object would trigger some thought, image, words. The steel bar of the bed frame that she’d wrapped her hand around. We fit, locked together like puzzle pieces. She pulled me in and gave me life from the deep spring inside her. My own genetic material had lived inside her. And what if it still did? A creamy burst, a microscopic explosion would bind us. Then I remembered the party at the Azamanians’, the big, slimy oysters I’d eaten while they were still alive. Did they swim inside me? And the lobsters, boiled alive but served cold, and the bay, warm and solid, strange plankton glowing in the sand at night, and the ocean everywhere around us; cold and roiling and teeming, it flung living and half-dead things upon the shores. I wondered when I would stop thinking about her. I could rub my own face with my own two hands, and those hands would be her hands, and she would hold me in her arms and I would go crazy. I started to go crazy anyway, wondering what was real.
Where was she? Had she made it to New Hampshire in one piece, only to find her daughter writhing on the grass, bleeding from her brain? Or were she and Lily already safe at home? Had Mike returned early, in an expansive mood? Had the sight of his injured wife inspired his compassion? Or had he sensed in her some troubling, independent spirit that would incite his need to dominate and destroy?
Would I be haunted by her ghost, be woken in the night, would I check my phone, lie there in cool sheets and think of her until it all came rushing back? We’d agreed to leave each other alone, to write only if necessary. This was a natural stopping point. Would I cave first? Would she write something beautiful? “I know what I’d do if you were here in my bed.” Would she tell a rambling story about the photo lab she worked at after high school, during that strange year after the attack, when the keepsake images of strangers gave her something to look forward to?
Would it ever end? Would I spend years sadistically refashioning events, squeezing life’s nervous contradictions into scene and action, would I write to her from time to time, asking for help with the details of her life, answering her questions about my children or my own attempts at happiness? Would this go on until the secret history and madness lost its power, the familiar click in my heart replaced by a cooling, a nostalgia, and a sense of camaraderie?
Cigarette smoke blew by. The clouds broke and sunlight poured through. The sudden beauty reassured us. We agreed that if it weren’t bad for us, we’d smoke five packs a day, take Ambien every night, ride motorcycles, and stop eating kale. It was one of those kooky, freewheeling conversations grown-ups have in an idyllic place when they’re trying to shake off the sorrow that it’s ending and they know they’re running out of time. Then Shari stood and went back for seconds, and Ginny went off to find a homework assignment for her final class.
On the second floor of the main building, I made copies of work to show my students: a few pages of Crumb, from an underground comic he did in the sixties—acid-tinged, id crazy—where this feminist chick beats up some cops, who tear off her dress, so she runs naked through the supermarket, knocking down all these repressed old hags. And Art Spiegelman, who used adorable mice to bring genocide to life, and proved to the world that comics could be literature. The main office was empty and dark. Fish swam on Mary’s glowing screensaver. And newer work, Phoebe Gloeckner’s obsessive rage tour of her abusive childhood and years of promiscuity. And Alison Bechdel’s lovingly wrought family drama, her dad in the closet, her own coming out, in fine black lines and gray-green ink wash. These were pages I’d burned into my brain and tried to steal, went crazy over and knocked my head against but just couldn’t beat, cartoonists who made me want to be one, until I came up with my own thing, before I quit.
For a while, in my twenties and thirties, I told stories that hit close to home, that were crucial to my existence, of love and sarcasm and maddening envy, daily mortification, sexual pity and raging insecurity, stylized fictionalization of stuff taken from my life. I stole the moral and ethical problems of friends and relations and gave them to imaginary beings, then worked like hell to turn line drawings into walking, talking flesh and blood.
I checked the page numbers, skimming to make sure I’d copied the right ones. I found myself rereading scenes I’d read a hundred times before. It seemed to me then that I’d missed the point of everything, and had ended up on the wrong side of the divide. It wasn’t up to me to judge cartoonists. The only thing that mattered was finding stuff I loved. I didn’t hate comics. I hated the need to make them. I loved comics. I hated the lifetime of pain and struggle it took to create a thing that anyone could read in an hour.
Downstairs, a kind of cocktail party spilled off the porch. The after-dinner crowd clustered at the drinks table and slumped on wicker couches. Along the front of the main building, conference-goers headed off on bikes to watch the sunset. The sky had cleared. The bay glowed a strange, prehistoric silver.
On the porch, a girl with freckles and a ponytail pushed by me, followed by a man with a flat nose like a boxer’s, holding a pen in one hand and a book in the other, for Tom McLaughlin to sign. Tom smiled back brightly but didn’t budge, holding his wine. He was worn out. The guy blanched. Dennis stood beside Tom, ignored by him, with a red nose.
I went over to a side table and poured half a bottle of wine into a cup, eavesdropping on a man with a bulging forehead and a woman in espadrilles offering her chicken recipe with leeks and mustard. A witty former student of mine, Ruth Gutenberg, Googlebaum, took my chin in her hand and, with a cocktail napkin, wiped some barbecue sauce off my face.