The Other Side of the World (5 page)

“Maybe,” I said. “But all that stuff about ports and loneliness—what was
that
all about? Some perverse way of… of…?”

“Stuck for words, Charlie?”

“Let's just forget it, okay?” I said. I picked up the check. “Let's just forget it and blow this joint.”

“Do you have one?”

“Very funny,” I said. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“You're not that funny,” I said. “You're weird—I'll give you that—and—like some of the characters in your books—with a distinctive mean streak. For sure. But you're not funny.”

“I'll take that as a compliment,” she said.

 

A short while later, in the car, Seana fell asleep, her head against the window, a rolled up sweater for a pillow. She snored lightly, her mouth open, and I tried to stay angry at her for making me believe, if only for a moment, that my father was living on borrowed time, but then it occurred to me that maybe he really was, and that when she saw my reaction, she had changed course.

I wondered, though: What difference did it make if I knew for sure—if he knew for sure—if he and Seana knew for sure, or if none of us knew anything? I tried to imagine what he might do if he
did
know—if he'd make any changes in the way he lived, and decided he wouldn't, which was when I realized that the idea of getting rid of the unused parts of his writing life might have come from the knowledge—and fear—that he wouldn't be here much longer, though a second later this led to the thought that the tag sale might have only been what it was: the kind of thing Max did now and then for no other reason than that he felt like doing it.

North of Portland, I turned off the main highway—Seana
was awake now, but quiet—and took a detour west toward Naples so we could swing by the place where I'd gone to summer camp as a kid—Camp Kingswood—and where I'd been a counselor the first two summers I was at UMass. I'd been to Maine a bunch of times in the years since I'd been a camper and counselor there—Nick and Trish were married in Maine, and the year Nick and I graduated from UMass, we'd gone up there and had a wild few days with a group of friends, eight or ten of us, partying, drinking, and screwing our asses off.

Now, seeing Camp Kingswood again—leaves gone from the trees, you could see the old bunk houses, and the lake beyond, the lake calm, flat, and steel-gray in the autumn chill—I found myself telling Seana about how, starting with my first summer there, I'd fallen in love, not so much with Maine's lakes or coastline, but with its trees, the evergreens especially—pine, hemlock, juniper, and, my favorite, Norwegian spruce.

What I'd loved about Maine, I said, was what I'd come to love about Borneo, even though the two landscapes had hardly anything in common, and that was how thick and deep the forests were, along with my sense that they were still—evergreen and hardwood here, tropical forests there—the way they might have been millions of years ago.

I talked about the different kinds of mangroves in the coastal regions of Borneo and how their root systems looked like tangles of swollen spider webs, and I talked about peat swamp forests, and how they could burst into flame spontaneously, or be set on fire by people clearing them, and how the fires could rage over hundreds of acres for months at a time and were almost impossible to extinguish because so much of the burning went on below ground, in the deepest layers of the peat. And I talked about forests I'd been to on my most recent visit to Kalimantan—Dipterocarp forests—probably at the same time Seana had been moving in with Max. About every four years—I'd been lucky enough to be there when it happened two years
before—the onset of dry weather conditions, combined with
El Niño
, resulted in an extraordinary explosion of color, where tens of thousands of trees in these forests, many of them a hundred and twenty or thirty feet high, and any single one of them bearing four
million
flowers, burst into bloom. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.

“Four million?” Seana said. “You counted?”

“Estimated,” I said.

“But these trees are dying—they're being logged away to make room for your palm oil plantations, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Palm oil was used in the making of napalm, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“So you are a shit,” she said.

“Probably. Still, I was wondering if you'd like to visit the forests with me and get to see them before they're gone?”

“Sure,” she said. And then: “‘ Death is the mother of beauty,' right?”

“Max used to say the same thing—a line from a poem, right?”

“‘Sunday Morning,' by Wallace Stevens—I heard the lines from Max the first time too. But you say you don't feel guilty?”

“About what?”

“About taking pleasure from seeing the beauty of these forests because you know they're dying.”

“What good would guilt do?”

“Actually,” she said, “and take it from an Irish girl who knows about such matters—when it's not self-destructive, guilt can be a splendid muse.”

“In some places I've been to in Borneo,” I said, “there can be more than seven hundred different species of trees in a twenty-five acre plot, which is more than the total number of tree species in the United States and Canada combined.”

“Impressive.”

“It's one reason—being able to get to Borneo easily and often—I've stayed at the job in Singapore.”

“And you'd go there—to Borneo—if you knew you were dying, yes?”

“Yes.”

Seana was quiet for a while, after which she said she'd come to the conclusion it would be a good idea if I was the one who wrote
Charlie's Story
, that she liked listening to me talk—to what she called the sweet, innocent timbre of my voice—and that maybe I could make this voice work on the page.

“I'm not as smart or talented as Max,” I said.

“Neither am I.”

“Not so,” I said.

“Well, who knows, Charlie?” she said. “But you do have the main thing most writers begin with: you loved to read when you were young. Because no matter what other reasons writers may give for why they write, most of them, in the end, will tell you that what made them want to be writers was that they loved to read when they were kids, and that they wanted to be able some day to write books that would be for others like the books they'd loved when they were growing up.”

“Max used to say pretty much the same thing when people asked him why he wrote,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Seana said. “And your father said you had a great thirst for advenure, right? So what could be more of an adventure than making up a story—creating a world that never actually existed, and peopling it with imaginary people you come to care about more than you often care about people you know, and all the while—all the while, Charlie—never knowing what's going to happen to them next?”

“When you start writing your novels, you
really
don't know what's going to happen to the people in it?”

“No,” Seana said.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Some writers—Nabokov most famously—claim they
always
know what's going to happen next—that a writer is like an omniscient god who controls the destinies of all his characters.”

“Doesn't sound like much fun,” I said.

“That's because, despite a sometimes useless habit of being more innocent and timid than is good for you, you're an essentially unique, adventurous, and playful young man,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Neither of us are as
playful
as your father is, though.”

“Not yet anyway,” I said.

“‘ Not yet anyway,'” she said, repeating my words, and when she did she looked away so that I couldn't see her eyes. Then: “Don't you think that's sad, Charlie?”

I wanted to say yes, but instead I answered her question by telling her that the blossoms in the Dicterocap forests were pale and dusty, and looked something like hibiscus blossoms—wide, flat, and fringed like crepe paper, and the color of blood oranges—and that their leaves were light green and fleshy.

“Every four years, did you say? Which means that in two years we can go there, you and I—book a trip together, yes?”

“Is that what you writers do—
book
trips?”

“You're not that funny either,” she said. “But sure—I'm game to go.”

I told her it was a deal, and explained what I'd learned on my trips there: that the massive flowering of the trees, and the fruiting that followed, had been a gift to the animals, especially to wild boar, who thrived on the seeds and spread them everywhere. I said that nobody knew how many centuries local populations had depended on those times when there was an abundance of seeds—and lots of pork to gorge on—but that anthropologists believed the relationship had lasted for as long as human beings had inhabited Borneo.

What I didn't say was that most scientists had concluded that logging had probably reduced the density of the forests below
the critical level needed to maintain reproductive cycles, and that the ecosystem was, therefore, irreparably damaged.

 

When we got to Tenants Harbor, I telephoned Nick's parents—his mother answered, a lucky break—and I said I was in the vicinity with a friend and would like to stop by. Mrs. Falzetti said to please come, but to give her a half hour or so to tidy up. Seana was surprised I hadn't called from Northampton, and I said I'd waited until we were nearby because I didn't want to give them a chance to reject a visit out-of-hand, which I figured would have happened if Lorenzo, who could be nasty at times, had picked up the phone.

We had some time to kill, so I drove us out to Port Clyde, a few miles away, and we walked along the boat landing, where the ferry to Monhegan Island docked. The air was crisp, near freezing, but without wind, and Seana slipped her arm into mine. The ocean, like the lake at Camp Kingswood, was steel-gray and calm, but I knew how changeable the weather could be—how a pearl-gray sky could turn to slate-black within seconds, and how winds could become ferocious and waves could come roaring in and swamp small boats.

“Did you ever spend time here with Nick, just the two of you?” Seana asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Once—a total disaster—when we stayed with his mother and father. And I visited him and Trish a few times after they were married. For a while—before they were married, when the three of us would come up here together—I thought I might settle in these parts—not in a town around here, but on an island off the coast, where I could be totally alone and wouldn't have to see or talk with anyone.”

“There
are
people around,” Seana said. “Still, it is peaceful and lovely here. Maybe Max and I can rent a house here for a few months—it would be a good place for getting work done. No distractions.”

“Except for Max,” I said.

“You never said how Nick died.”

“You're right. I never said how Nick died.”

“Do his parents know how he died?”

“I assume so. The embassy called from Singapore, and I called too.”

“And what did you tell them?” Seana said. “And can you stop being such a tight-ass with me about it? Is there some deep, dark secret here?”

“No,” I said. “Just stupidity. Nick could be incredibly stupid sometimes—a real stupid son of a bitch. A lucky son of a bitch too a lot of the time.”

“But not this time.”

“Not this time,” I said, and I told her what had happened: how, on the first Saturday night after I'd returned from Borneo, he got drunk at a party he threw in his apartment.

“He was showing off,” I said, “and I was out on his balcony—I was pretty plastered too, and busting his chops—and he came at me, and I managed to step aside at the last second and he couldn't stop—miscalculated—and pitched over the railing. His apartment was sixteen stories high.”

“And…?”

“And I tried to catch him—to grab him—but it was too late, of course, and when I sobered up, I went to the morgue and ID'd the body—puked all over the place, and over Nick too. Projectile vomiting, like a baby…”

“Good,” Seana said.

“
Good
?”

“A vegetable kind of justice.”

“I thought you're not supposed to say bad things about the dead.”

“Why not? Given the way you and Max talk about him, it sounds as if he got what he deserved, including your leftovers.”

“Sure,” I said. “The way you got Max's leftovers, right?”

“You
can
be nasty.”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, I
do
like that in you, Charlie,” she said. “But tell me this: given your dislike of Nick's father, along with your claim about not being affected by guilt, why the compulsion to pay your respects?”

I was ready for her question, and said that Nick had been an only child, same as me, and that all through my teenage years, and occasionally since, I'd imagined what my father would feel if he had to watch my coffin being lowered into a grave, especially if it happened at a time when he was without a wife or live-in girlfriend, and when I'd told this to Nick, he said he'd had similar thoughts about him and
his
father, but that there was nothing for me to worry about, because knowing Max, he bet that if Max were single when I kicked off, he wouldn't stay single long.

“I'm with Nick on that,” Seana said, “but imagining what people will feel after you're dead—that's ordinary self-serving stuff we all indulge in now and then. It doesn't account for why we're making this trip.”