The Other Side of the World (26 page)

“Yes.”

“But you also know that I've never been a big fan of romantic notions of love.”

“I've read your books.”

“In fact, and I borrow from Auden here, I sometimes find myself believing there's no notion—no Western notion, anyway—that's been responsible for more misery—not to mention bad poetry—than the belief that a certain vague, quasi-mystical experience called ‘falling in love' is something every normal man and woman is supposed to have.”

“I agree about the poetry,” I said.

“Don't make light of what I'm saying,” she said. “Please? I'm being serious in a way I'm not used to being.”

“I'm not making light of what you said—I'm just disagreeing with you. Auden notwithstanding, I guess I'm still a romantic the way Max was…”

She turned away from me, and we didn't talk for a while. I watched students come and go, with their backpacks, Yale-blue scarves, and rolling suitcases. At the end of our bench, a young couple—tall black girl, stocky white boy—were kissing playfully, nibbling on each other.

“Maybe we could adopt,” I offered.

“Maybe,” she said. “Not as much fun, though.”

“There are lots of healthy children—orphans—in Borneo. When I considered staying on there—making it my home—I thought about adopting one of them.”

“I read your story,” Seana said, “and there's nothing in it about adopting children. Who would have taken care of them when you had to be away? Tamika? Jin-gen? Amanda and Alicia?”

“I said I
thought
about it. I didn't say I had a plan.”

“Why adopt if you could marry and have your own?”

“Look,” I said. “It was just a passing thought, and it was probably smarmy-romantic and unrealistic, like a lot of my ideas. Save-the-Children, right? But what I
did
realize—this hit home when I had to imagine what Yu-huan might have to go through—when I knew what others like her
did
go through—I realized that having kids wasn't about what I felt, or what I needed.”

“Of course not.”

“I mean, give me some credit for understanding that having kids is about
them
and not about me.”

“Why are you telling me this, Charlie?”

“Children don't ask to come into the world.”

“So?”

“So I knew women—here, not there—who, when they talked about having kids would drive me crazy with the way they'd go on and on about becoming mothers—about how much they looked forward to
the experience
of being a mother.”

“You never heard me talk that way, did you?”

“No.”

“Then shut up about it. I told you before, I would have made a very good mother.”

“And, according to what I heard before, you think you still could be.”

“Damned right.”

“But come on, Seana. Talk about being romantic and unrealistic—and about driving
yourself
crazy with what probably can't be.”

“Okay,” she said. “I get the point. You're right, and I'm right, and we're both right.” She shrugged. “So maybe, like you, what I need is a plan.”

“Maybe.”

“So let's make plans, you and me,” she said, her eyes bright again, as if she'd just thought of something mischievous, and she began talking about how her mother and sisters might react to seeing her again. They'd be sure to ask us to stay over, and if they did, where would we sleep? She giggled at the prospect of bringing me—a handsome, young Jewish boy—home for a sleepover, and I asked if she might be under the spell of an incipient form of Irish Alzheimer's—if bringing me home wasn't just her way of acting out on old grudges.

“Ah, you really
are
smart, Charlie,” she said. “Max often talked about how smart you were—‘shrewd' was the word he sometimes used, ‘shrewd if innocent' his operative phrase. He talked about you a lot, you know.”

“I didn't.”

“Whenever he sent me a letter, he'd report on what you were doing, and what he said each time you moved to a new place, or changed jobs, or had a new girlfriend, was that in his opinion you were only at the beginning of your potential.”

“My potential as
what?
”

“He was proud of who you
were
, Charlie, not of what you
did
.”

“And if he knew about Nick?”

“He'd be even prouder. Give him some credit for being a man whose values you come by honestly.”

“Such as?”

“What you told me he said about loss and no loss.”

“Still—ridiculous fact—I
am
a murderer,” I said. “Max never killed anyone, as far as we know.”

“According to my reading of your story, you
might
be a murderer,” Seana said. “There's some essential—and intentional—ambiguity in the way you tell that part of the story.”

“Is that what excites you about me—that I might have killed someone?”

She roughed up my hair. “Oh Charlie, my little rascal—my little Raskal-nikov,” she said. “You really are something, aren't you, the stuff that spins around in that pretty head of yours.”

“I hope so,” I said. “But what's weird is that I feel almost nothing about what I did.”

“
If
you did it.”

“And no guilt I'm aware of. No
regrets
. I don't find myself wishing Nick were still alive.”

“Who does?” Seana said. “Not his father. Not Trish certainly.”

“Never Trish.”

“Which reminds me,” Seana said. “I took the liberty of making a copy of your story and sending it to her—a way of thanking her for our time there, and a way for the three of us to remain close to one another.”

“But I never said you could—”

“It's just a story, Charlie, though it's a good one,” she said. “Lots of sweet ambiguity—some of which, like whether you were or were not drunk the night of Nick's death—may remain a mystery forever.”

“You noticed the disparity—between what I said and what I wrote,” I said.

“I pay attention to you, Charlie,” she said. “But do
you
remember what I said, about how sweet it would be if you could transpose the way you talked into a voice that could talk the same way—an equivalent—but on the page?”

“I remember.”

“Well, you've done it,” she said. “Beginner's luck maybe, but
it gives me leave to tell you what
I
think, which is that it was your father's secret wish that you become the writer he never was. That's what his tag sale was really about. You see that, don't you?”

“No.”

“He had no knowledge—no inkling—that
I'd
show up that morning, but I think he knew that setting out his wares would lure you home.”

“You don't think it was
you
—him writing me with the news that
you
were living with him that did the trick?”

“No.”

“What about him maybe wishing I'd come home and fall in love with you, so that after he was gone, the two of us…”

“Good try, but I think you're changing the subject.”

Seana was looking past me, and I turned, watched an elderly man, his head and ankles wrapped in brightly colored scarves, wheeling a shopping cart across the waiting room floor. The man took a clear plastic bag of what looked like garbage from the cart, and stuffed it into a mail box.

“As far as I know,” I said, “I never wanted to be a writer the way he did—or the way you did.”

“Could have fooled me. Because you have something neither of us—me or Max—have: the ability to turn the stuff out without worrying every word and sentence to death.”

“
You
worry things?”

“Stop,” she said. “And think about the difference. Max lived past the proverbial three score and ten, and published one good, somewhat thin novel, and two short, serviceable literary studies. I'm forty-four—
almost
forty-five—and all I have to show for myself so far are two weird, shamelessly successful novels, but
you
—you sit down, and in ten days, with people coming and going—strangers, relatives, old friends—you knock out something Max and I would have been proud to put our names to.”

“But I wasn't writing fiction,” I said. “I wasn't making things up.”

“Could have fooled me,” she said again.

“Well maybe I did make up a few things here and there—embellish my memories—but what you believe about his secret wish—you're not saying it just to make me feel good?”

“What would make you think I'd want to make you feel good?”

The overhead PA system clicked on, a voice announcing that our train was ready for boarding. We picked up our bags, walked toward the escalator, then down and along a tunnel and up again to where the train to New York City was waiting.

 

A few minutes after the train left the station, Seana took a manila envelope from her overnight bag, and handed it to me.

“A gift,” she said.

“From you?”

“From Max.”

I opened the envelope, withdrew a manuscript. Under the title—A Missing Year—there was a hand-written note:

“Wasn't this on the list you gave me—the title of one of the stories you asked me to choose from, my first night home?” I asked.

“Yes. So it's one story neither of us will have to write,” Seana said. “It's fairly long, and I want to take a nap, so why don't you read it while I grab some
Z
's, and we can talk about it later.”

“But if he'd already written the story, why…?”

“Shh,” she said, placing a finger against my lips. “Later, please. I'm bone-tired. Also, I adore the sound and motion of trains—the rattling and rocking and clanging, plus our reflections hanging out there in the air on the other side of the window. I think I've always loved being on-my-way as much as you love being between-here-and-there, so be a good boy and give
me a kiss good night, and we'll talk after you've read the story, okay? But think about this, Charlie—a thought that may surprise you, given what I said before: that if there is such a thing as love, maybe it shows itself forth in stories and in who we choose to tell them to—in the way we exchange stories of our lives with others…”

She rolled up a sweater, put it next to the window, closed her eyes. I leaned over, kissed her on the cheek.

 

 

Dearest Charlie,

If you are reading this, wherever you are, it will mean, of course, that I am no longer here (there?)—a shame, since when all is said and done, and here I paraphrase Orwell, I find that this world does suit me fairly well. And wherever I am, and unless we've both arrived simultaneously in some universe designed by Calvino or Borges, what I'm certain of is that there is no ‘I' there. I never thought to persuade you of that—that when we're gone, we're gone and that's all there is to it, so that the only immortality, as our people (mostly) believe (Jews, but not only Jews—cf. Shakespeare's sonnets), lies in our children, in the memories others have of us (flawed and self-serving as they may be), and in whatever work we may have left behind: literary stuff, of course—poems, novels, plays, essays, stories—but
anything
made by one's mind or hands that has tangible existence: music, furniture, boats, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, clothing, houses…

Consciousness is fine—much studied and celebrated in recent times—but much overrated too, in my opinion, for even were it to survive in some way—were we, as in typical tales composed about such after-lives, to wake from death and find that, detached from any bodily being, mind and thought are, miraculously, still ongoing, I would doubtless spend whatever timeless
time this ‘I'—this consciousness recognizably me and no one else—had been given, lamenting the loss of senses. Taste, touch, sight, sound, smell—smell above all!—how ever, ever, ever undervalue them?

I.e., the grave's a fine and private place, as Marvell famously wrote, but none, I think, do there embrace. Other articulations of this notion, along with its innumerable
carpe diem
corollaries about preferring the sybaritic, now accelerate within, creating a rather sweet traffic jam, yet I banish them at once, even as I ask forgiveness for my literary excesses, references, and airs, yes? These vague, indulgent musings are—of course, of course—my somewhat arch way of avoiding telling you what I've decided to tell you about what I've always thought of as my ‘missing' year—and also a reminder (to me) of how often in this life I've used words on paper to avoid other things. Through most of my life, that is, I've had the largely benign habit of passing whatever I experienced, in mind or flesh, through the filter (lens?) of what, other than you, my son, was the great love of my life: stories.

I tested (tasted?) all I did—my writing, teaching, wives, romances, friendships, pleasures, losses, memories, feelings—all, all, all—through stories I'd read, and people, places, and events I'd come to know in them. More: I often gave myself up as fully as I was able to the imagination of others—let myself believe I was part of the mind—the sensibility—that had conjured up these worlds so that, I suppose—vain hope!—my own imagination, like theirs, might find objects and tales equal to my desire to find them…

But to the missing year itself: My great fear, you see, was that I would kill
you
, Charlie. I
wanted
to kill you. The idea of killing you thrilled and pleased in a time distinctly bereft of thrills or pleasure. For a year—fourteen months and three days, to be exact, as I wrote earlier—I thought, every day, of killing you. The thought arrived, as you might guess, attached to my desire
to do away with myself, and this desire arrived shortly before your mother left us both (nor, I note quickly, did I ever stoop, to keep her from leaving us, to blackmailing her with the threat that I would kill the two of us if she did leave us). But the desire to kill the two of us came—this dark, unwelcome guest—and it stayed for more than a year, yet could occasionally, when most robust, bring with it (paradoxically?) an exhilarating feeling of liberation.