She's Not There Read online

  “Are you still seeing him—the boyfriend?”

  Grace smiled at me. “That depends,” she said.

  I stayed the night at my sister’s apartment down on Hanover Square. Grace slept on the foldout couch. The next day we went to the Statue of Liberty on the ferry. We noticed that on the ferry all the tourists stood in the front of the boat, taking pictures of the Statue of Liberty. The New Yorkers stood in the back, looking back at Manhattan.

  Later that summer I brought Grace home to Pennsylvania to meet my mother. “Your mother is the nicest person I’ve ever met,” Grace said. “It’s almost scary how kind and cheerful she is. She’s like a balloon filled with helium.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  Grace came as my date to Curly’s wedding in Charlotte. The groom’s friends were all emaciated Caucasians from the East Coast. One guy, pale as a sheet of typewriter paper, cut himself shaving and bled and bled and bled all over his tuxedo shirt. The bride’s friends, meanwhile, were all tanned and southern and poised. The wedding went on for days. There was a bridesmaid’s party and a rehearsal and a rehearsal dinner and a barbecue given by the grandmother and a special play that Curly wrote in honor of the occasion and the wedding itself and the reception afterward and then a party the next day, after the reception, at Uncle Rochester’s house.

  In the receiving line, Mary Catherine’s mother took me aside and had me sign the family Bible. Then she started crying. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said Mary Catherine’s mother. “I am just so concerned about this marriage. You see, it’s your friend Curluhee. He’s a—a— well, you know. I suppose the word is heathen.”

  I nodded. She had that right.

  Curly and Mary Catherine started arguing about money on their honeymoon and were divorced within the year.

  The day after the wedding, after Uncle Rochester’s party, Grace and I got in the Volkswagen and started heading north. We took small back roads through Virginia, and at one point, in some small hamlet, we passed a rickety-looking log cabin that had exactly half of a Ford Mustang embedded in its outer wall. In big neon lights there was a sign that read, HOUSE OF MYSTERY. And in smaller lights: “Now Open.”

  We turned to each other and said, simultaneously, “Do you want to stop?”

  Then we each shrugged and said, “No. Let’s just keep going.”

  So we didn’t stop at the House of Mystery. I don’t know what it was. In the years since, though, I’ve often wondered about what we would have found inside. A whole different life, perhaps.

  I dropped Grace off at her apartment, then returned to Baltimore. I was twenty-nine years old and felt, for the first time, as if my life were finally beginning.

  My apartment felt like an Egyptian tomb when I got home, a place where incomprehensible strangers lived unfathomable lives, thousands of years ago. There were statues of Anubis in the kitchen, funerary urns by the bed.

  I went to the closet with an enormous garbage bag. Into this I put my skirts, my hose, the blue knit top, some underwear, my makeup, some bobby pins, everything. Then I tied up the trash bag and walked out to the curb and left it there.

  We will never speak of this again, I thought. Here at last we shall leave all of this and move onward with this new life, finally, miraculously, healed.

  There I was, standing beneath the Baltimore sky, but as I stood there I remembered waves crashing against a jetty in Surf City, a child praying to be transformed by love. I looked inside myself, searching for the woman I had always felt myself to be. But she’s not there.

  Sssh. She thinks it’s classical.

  Part 2

  Florence, Italy, 1999. Then we passed across the Bridge of Sighs.

  Bright Star (1988–1999)

  Grace and I had an Alaskan honeymoon. We spent a week on land, in Denali National Park, in Nome and Kotzebue and Fairbanks and Anchorage. Then we took a cruise ship down the Inside Passage past Juneau and Ketchikan to Vancouver. It was daytime, all night long.

  On the cruise ship we were seated at dinner with another couple named the McHenrys, from Ohio, as well as the ship’s radio-telegraph operator, a Scotsman named Freddy. We were the only newlyweds on the ship. The captain sent us a bottle of champagne. During dinner one night, Lois McHenry explained that during her wedding twenty-eight years ago, she had left her body, had floated above the ceremony like an angel.

  “You never told me that story,” said her husband. He didn’t sound glad to hear about it now.

  “I know,” said Lois. She sounded sad.

  “’Tis streenge,” said Freddy, drinking champagne, resplendent in his epaulets. “Iddin’ it?”

  We nodded. It was streenge all right. “Ah, but ’tis a good life,” he added. “The life at sea.”

  On the Royal Princess we drank blender drinks and sat on the deck playing Scrabble and watched giant chunks of ice calve off glaciers. In Denali we rented a small plane and flew around Mt. McKinley, which was shrouded in clouds. We saw a grizzly bear chasing a baby moose.

  At the table next to ours in the galley was a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. As a result of two different strains of cancer, the husband couldn’t talk and the wife couldn’t hear. They looked happy.

  “’Tis a good life,” said Grace. “The life at sea.”

  We rented a giant U-Haul and moved to Maine, where I’d landed a teaching job at Colby College, in Waterville. I drove the truck, and Grace drove her Prelude, and Zero drove my Volkswagen. Each of us took on an alias for the road. Grace became Sweet-Pea. Zero became Bluto. And I became Little Sal. It took three days to drive to Maine, and the U-Haul died, literally, in the driveway of our new house.

  In the morning we woke up in our new bedroom, boxes piled up to the ceiling. We opened the windows. Our house stood in the middle of a green field; at the edges of the field was a pine forest. We heard the chirping of crickets in the field, peepers in the woods.

  One of our wedding presents was a cardboard box full of Thai ingredients and a Thai cookbook. There weren’t any Thai restaurants in Waterville, so Grace started cooking. Suddenly my meals contained things like coconut milk and galangal.

  We had a fireplace and a wood-burning furnace. The snow began to fall just before Thanksgiving, and that was the last we saw of the lawn until April. We loved the intense Maine winter—icicles three feet long hanging off the rain gutters, snow thigh deep, our breath gathering around us in cold clouds.

  We took up cross-country skiing. We traveled through farmers’ fields and down fire roads that cut through forest. One of the trails led to a barn where a fellow ran a spa. There we would sit, steaming in a wood-fired sauna. Then we’d run through the snow into another barn where there was a cedar hot tub. Grace and I drank champagne in the tub and listened to Coleman Hawkins on the stereo, then ran naked through the snow again and sat in the sauna. I had never spent so much time naked outside before. After all this, we’d head home and watch Alfred Hitchcock movies on the VCR as a fire blazed in the fireplace.

  One time we watched Vertigo, which I found kind of sad. I felt bad for Jimmy Stewart. He seemed to have lost perspective.

  In our second year in Maine, we planted a garden—tomatoes and pumpkins and squash and Brussels sprouts and corn. To our shock, it all grew. The garden made a lot of demands on us, though—weeding and tilling and watering; it was worse than having a dog.

  So in July of 1989 we abandoned the garden and went on a bicycle trip through Burgundy. We spent our days cycling past vineyards and castles. We stood in the ruins of Cluny. We rode downhill through Beaune. Grace bought cheese and baguettes and chocolate from grocers, and we ate them in hay fields. One day, we ate lunch at the edge of the field in which were the grapes for Gevrey-Chambertin. That afternoon we paused at Château Charlemagne.

  In the château was a grumpy old woman who showed tourists around. At one point, she said, “Some people think”—she paused for breath—“time is money.” Pause again. “But time i
s not money. Time is—a gift from God.”

  Grace was accepted at the Smith School for Social Work and began the MSW program in the summer of 1990. Smith requires three summers of residency in Northampton and two internships in the years in between the residencies. As she drove off for the first residency, in Boston, in her blue Prelude, she cried. I stayed behind, working in the garden.

  A few days later I got a phone call from my friend Walt Bode, an editor at Grove Press. I’d sent him my novel, The Planets, which was based on a symphony by Holst, sort of. Walt wasn’t sure he could publish it at Grove, but he’d given the manuscript to Gordon Kato, who was an assistant to an agent at International Creative Management. A few days later, Kris Dahl at ICM called me. “Listen,” she said. “I think we can close a deal on this book.”

  “Who are you again?” I said.

  “I sent it out to editors at Norton, Simon and Schuster, and Random House. We’ve got offers from Norton and Poseidon—that’s the imprint at Simon and Schuster. I’m gonna let ’em stew until Monday. But it’s looking good. I’m hoping we can make this a two-book deal, with a film option.”

  “Who are you again?” I said.

  The Planets came out the following year, 1991. It got good reviews. The New Yorker said I was “wacky.” Kris closed five foreign rights deals, and soon Die Planeten and Planety and so on were coming out in Germany, Poland, Japan, Holland, not to mention the United Kingdom and Ireland and Australia. The Times of London said it was a “book of the year.” The Independent said, “This is the great success of American literature in this country. The Planets is glorious and brilliant.”

  The New York Times thought it was stupid.

  Still, Planets established me, for a little while, anyway, as a writer on the national scene, and a year or two later it had a pleasant life as a paperback in the Vintage Contemporaries series. The film rights were sold to a man named Mark Rosenberg, who had made Dry White Season, The White Hotel, and most significantly, the touching King Ralph. A few months after optioning Planets he dropped totally dead of a heart attack, which was of course not my fault.

  In 1991 we moved into a bigger house in Belgrade Lakes. I bought a dog from a pig farmer, who claimed Lucy was a golden retriever. She looked more like a short-haired yellow Lab, though. Her tongue was bright purple.

  We had a hot tub on the back porch of our new house. We’d sit out there under the stars, drinking. One July Fourth, Grace got out of the tub and lit a sparkler. Then she ran around the backyard naked, her body illuminated softly as the sparks flew all around. She ran to the garden and back.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Naked woman fireworks,” she said.

  She wasn’t kidding, either.

  Grace started working as a social worker at a local mental health agency. Soon she was seeing a caseload of clients, most of them suffering from the traditional vices and agonies of rural life: spousal abuse, incest, ignorance, alcoholism, drug abuse, child abuse, abandonment, and so on. I used to ask her, “Listen, you have these clients who are two hundred pounds overweight, they’re married to their brother, they can’t read or write, they’re alcoholics, and they’re only fifteen years old. Don’t you ever want to say, ‘Hey, man, your problem is, your life sucks’?”

  Grace smiled, but then she answered. “No,” she said. “I never want to say that.”

  One day she came home and mentioned one of her new clients. “You know anything about transsexuality?” she asked.

  I nodded. I knew something about it.

  “I’ve got this woman who wants to be a man,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, all I know is that life must be very hard for transsexuals. I think it’s a condition most people don’t understand.”

  “You got that right,” said Grace.

  Colby decided, after about five years, not to fire me, and somehow I passed almost seamlessly from the guy who was probably just about to get canned to campus legend. The Insider’s Guide to American Colleges came out one year and said that I was the one Colby professor whose course you had to take before you graduated. The course they had in mind was Literature and Imagination, whose reading list included The Cat in the Hat Comes Back,“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Four Quartets, A Streetcar Named Desire, Henry IV, Part I, Giovanni’s Room, Going After Cacciato, Love in the Time of Cholera, “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Dead,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” Frankenstein, and The Yellow Wallpaper. I used to give the students two papers to do—and the assignment was the same for each one: “Write a seven- to ten-page paper related to class affairs. The paper may be as scholarly or as personal as you wish.” That kept ’em busy.

  A lot of the books on the list concerned characters using their imaginations to find solace from the sorrows of the world.

  In the spring, Grace and I always attended the annual faculty-trustee cocktail party and dinner, which frequently failed to be electrifying. Trustees would always ask me if I was a senior. One year, just before the dinner started, Grace turned to me and whispered, “What do you say we blow this joint?” and I said, “I’m with you,” and the two of us jumped in the Volkswagen (I had a Passat by now) and drove to a fancy restaurant in Litchfield, almost an hour away.

  We’d been married for five years. They had been, without question, the five happiest years of my life.

  “So do we want to have kids?” Grace asked me.

  “I don’t know, do we?”

  For the next two hours, over the appetizers and the salad and the main course, we talked about all the reasons not to have children. How we feared the unknowns of pregnancy and child rearing. How we feared that the world was an unstable place. How we feared that we would not be good parents. How we feared a loss of intimacy, that the arrival of children would take us away from the sweet years we had shared and into a new and unknown place.

  The dessert came, a thick chocolate torte. We drank Cognac.

  “So I guess that it’s not a good time to have kids,” Grace said.

  “I guess that’s what we’re saying.”

  “But we do want to have them someday, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you think there will ever be a good time?”

  I shrugged. “Nope.”

  “So then,” Grace said. She raised her Cognac glass. I raised mine.

  That night we discontinued the use of birth control. Exactly nine months later, on a freezing cold Maine February day, a child was born.

  It is some testimony to Grace’s steadfastness that she had the baby exactly on the due date. When our second child was born, he arrived exactly on the due date as well.

  When I got home from the hospital the night of Luke’s birth, I went outside into the falling snow to walk the dog. The baby book had said to bring a soiled diaper home with you from the hospital, so the dog could sniff it and get used to the idea of the baby’s smell. I put a tiny diaper on the floor of the kitchen. Lucy sniffed it, then looked at me. Yeah, so? You guys went and had a baby. What do you want me to do, throw a parade?

  I walked in the snow with the dog on a leash and a glass of Hennessey and a cigar. It was hard to hold all of these things at once, but I did.

  The college hired a new creative writer named Richard Russo. I didn’t know anything about him when he arrived except that he’d published a quirky novel called Mohawk and another less quirky one called The Risk Pool. Like mine, his paperbacks were Vintage Contemporaries. We were going to share an office in the fall, which I wasn’t crazy about. I went over to meet him at a summer place he’d rented, and there he was—short, eloquent, and hilarious. His wife, Barb, had beautiful laughing eyes, which didn’t surprise me a bit. After an afternoon of Russo, I could see that anyone who spent much time around him would have laugh lines.

  I now think of the time that Russo and I shared an office as best of all the years I’ve spent teaching at Colby. I used to come back to the office and find no one in the department, the place
apparently evacuated—but one professor’s door would be closed and I’d hear Russo’s voice, and I’d open the door, and there would be the whole department, maybe fifteen professors, all jammed into one room, listening to Russo tell dirty jokes. I particularly remember one story, the punch line of which was, “And the bear says to the guy, ‘Say, you don’t really come up here for the huntin’, do you?’” As this line was delivered, scholars fled from the office with tears running down their faces, their pants wet.

  Russo’s presence was a definite plus.

  One day I bought an inflatable pterodactyl with an eight-foot wingspan, blew it up, and hung it from the high ceiling of our office. I threaded strings through the wings, through pulleys, and attached them to the doorknob, so that when Russo opened the door, not only would the pterodactyl dive toward him, it would also flap its wings.

  He didn’t notice it.

  Luke and I were alone in the house, and the lights were out. This wasn’t that unusual. In rural Maine the power goes out all the time, at least once a week.

  I lit candles and fed the baby. Luke, sitting in his high chair, looked at me with an odd grin. Suddenly I said, “Luke, can you talk?”

  He smiled and looked around. Then he said, “Hi, Daddy.”

  I woke up from a nightmare, covered in sweat. Moonlight shone down on the snow outside.

  I asked myself, in the softest of voices,You don’t still want to be a woman, do you?

  And I said, Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  You do.

  I got back into bed. The baby lay asleep in the bed between Grace and me. I put my arm around them, mother and child, protecting them. They were warm.

  The Russos and the Boylans went to Disneyland together. Grace sat on a wall outside of It’s a Small World breast-feeding Luke while the two famous authors rode screaming down Splash Mountain. I didn’t say it was your laughin’ place, Br’er Fox, I said it was my laughin’ place.