17
And something I didn’t remember, not until I was reminded of it eight months after that morning in Japantown. I had traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a large annual writers’ conference where I ran into an old friend whom I hadn’t seen since we were in our twenties. As we stood in the cavernous, crowded exhibition hall, we caught up about kids, husbands, books, teaching. It never occurred to me to share my recent discovery with her. It wasn’t the time or place, and besides, we hardly even knew each other anymore. Just before I was about to move on to the next booth, she referred back to the long-ago summer when we first met as young writers with fellowships to Bread Loaf, a conference in Middlebury, Vermont.
“When I think of you, I think of one particular night,” she said. “A bunch of us were sitting around a picnic table after dinner—the fellows and the faculty—do you remember?”
She paused and looked at me searchingly. The faculty at Bread Loaf was made up of literary giants. A few of the fellows had since gone on to become giants themselves. Had something happened that night?
“Mark Strand stared at you across the table and said, You aren’t Jewish. He declared it. Like it was a fact. In front of everybody. He wouldn’t let it go. He just kept staring. You aren’t Jewish. There’s no possibility you’re Jewish.”
My old friend’s words sank in, and the noise of the D.C. conference hall receded around me as if someone had just hit the mute button. The familiar refrain now meant something altogether different, and no part of me could shrug it off.
“There was such an edge to it,” she went on. “He was a poet, a man who knew precisely the value and import of language. He was totally aware of the impact of his words. It was like he was stripping you of who you were. He just kept repeating it over and over again. He got angrier and angrier, as if he thought you were lying.”
If pressed, I wouldn’t have been able to place myself at that picnic table. Whatever had happened that night was buried beneath layers of cotton wool. Nor would I have been able to say for certain that I had ever met Mark Strand. I could picture his craggy, handsome face. He looked a bit like Clint Eastwood. He was a romantic figure, Poet Laureate of the United States, a hero of mine. Just recently I had come across a photograph on Instagram of Strand’s grave in upstate New York. His tombstone, polished but left rough on top, was stark against the snow. MARK STRAND, POET. 1934–2014. He died at eighty. Across the bottom of the tombstone, a line from a poem of his own: WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.
“I’ve never forgotten that moment,” my friend said. “You were so poised in your response to him. You didn’t give away what you must have been feeling. I wondered what that poise was costing you.”
“I don’t recall any of this,” I said softly.
Little blondie.
As it turned out, Mark Strand knew something about me that I didn’t know. He set his gaze on me as if applying a contour map. It wasn’t just my blond hair and blue eyes. No—this had to do with angles, bone structure, skin tone—this was data that didn’t add up. My dismissal of that clearly offended him. Here was a highly perceptive person—a poet I admired to such a degree that I later used a line from a poem of his as an epigraph to one of my novels—demanding that I take a good hard look at myself.
How was it that I had never suspected? Not even after my mother had let slip the method of my conception? I was in my early thirties that summer at Bread Loaf. It had been only a half dozen years since Susie had told me about the practice of mixing sperm. It seems a sliver of doubt would have wedged itself within me. But there was no doubt. No suspicion. I staunchly ignored the evidence. Instead, I sat, glib and certain under the starry Vermont sky, incurious about why this kept happening, why Mark Strand felt moved to speak with such conviction.
Story of my life was what I usually said with a shrug and a sigh. A phrase that seemed to cost me nothing. Story of my life.