MY STORY COULD END happily upstairs, with me safe in my wife’s arms, but there is another thing that I have to tell.
Last year I concluded a lengthy and exhausting series of cross-country readings that ended with a couple of appearances in New Orleans, and I got the idea that I would call Annie in Pittsburgh and invite her to fly down and meet me in the land of dreamy dreams. We had worked hard at our marriage since the affair with Susan, forgiveness had been found. It was thrilling to feel the constant comfort of love that I felt for her while I was away. The trip had been successful, but I had been homesick the whole time. The idea of staying for a while in this beautiful city was almost like planning a second honeymoon.
I was staying in a fine old hotel on Royal Street, right in the heart of the French Quarter, and learned that I could keep the rooms for another week if I wanted. The weather had been beautiful, late springtime, in the eighties, and the air was full of the fragrance of flowers. Jackson Square had rocked all night with the backbeat rhythms of jazz and blues, street musicians occupied every bench along the promenade, and to wander among them holding hands with my wife seemed exactly the way I wanted to end my tour. These small romantic moments were the things Annie and I had begun to find together. I believed I had lived my entire life in search of what Annie and I now shared.
I had had little time to myself since I arrived in the city, no time for music and little leisure to enjoy even the good food. Both of us loved the city. We had friends in the Garden District we had stayed with many times, in the funny little guest cottage alongside their house. We had sipped sweet tea on the sunporch and watched the late sunshine break into prisms as it passed through the leaded glass of the windows on its way into the yolk-yellow rooms. We could stay with them again this week, if we wanted, we were always welcome, but my idea was that this would be a week to ourselves, just for us. We deserved it, didn’t we, after all we had been through? We would hide ourselves away in the Quarter for a whole week and not come up for air. We would not even call our old friends in the District. We would browse the bookstores—Faulkner House in Pirate’s Alley, Beaucoup Books down on Magazine. We would swallow Gulf oysters by the dozen at Acme Oyster Bar, eat crawfish étouffée at Les Pauls’, drink gallons of chicory coffee and stuff ourselves with sugary beignets at Café Du Monde. Later we would diet, we would count calories and fat grams, but for now we would indulge ourselves in whatever pleasures we chose. Long gone were the days when the two of us could stay out late on Bourbon Street and drink Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s—I remembered the boy I had been in graduate school and wished Annie had been in my life in those high old days—but there were many pleasures left to us nevertheless. The azaleas were long gone, of course, but as alcohol and danger were not the key to my happiness any longer, New Orleans is a flower garden all summer, and there were other dark blossoms of strange beauty and fragrance to replace what was already past.
There was so much I wanted us to do. Annie loved the out-of-way places, the voodoo shops and little art galleries across Esplanade. I wanted us to browse through these together. On her last visit she had bought an original Michalopolous oil, a painting of an eerie house in the District, with spatial distortions and garish colors, and had hung it in our living room in Pittsburgh. We were living in a different house by this time, not the old monstrosity where we had suffered so, but the painting reminded her, she said, of the architectural and emotional distortions of our life in those bad old days in that sad old house. Annie even liked the danger of New Orleans, a city teeming with murderers. These are not to be taken lightly, especially at night, off the beaten path, but for my romantic wife even these real threats were a part of New Orleans’s charm. I called home from my hotel room and proposed the trip to her and immediately she was delighted. It was a wonderful idea, she agreed. She had missed me, and this would be a perfect way to reenter our daily schedule together. I felt successful and happy. Later she called the hotel again, when I was out, and left a message detailing her flight plans and time of arrival. An impulsive trip like this would be expensive, but we agreed it would be worth it. I had rented a car and would have no problem picking her up at the airport the following morning.
I had the remainder of the day to myself. For the first time on my long trip I felt a little lonely. I had missed Annie, but my days had been constantly filled with people. I had not had a free moment in weeks, and now here I sat in the caesura between the hassle of readings and appearances and the easy bliss I anticipated with my wife. I thought about taking a nap back at the hotel but chided myself for the thought. You are in New Orleans, I said, there is so much to see. I walked around the Quarter a bit, strolled among the street performers, past Tennessee Williams’s home, past the rooms where Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes, through the French Market, where I bought a trinket for Annie. I stopped at an out-of-the-way diner down by the river and ate an oyster po’boy and drank a glass of sweet tea. I loved New Orleans, I decided for the one millionth time.
Then the most amazing coincidence occurred. As I was finishing my sandwich and tea, I thought I recognized a man standing at the register speaking to the bar maid about his bill. There was a friendly familiarity in the way that he went over the bill with the girl that I recognized before I even saw his face. I had not seen him in many years, not since the day in Alabama when he stiffed me for the bill for drinks.
I said, “Ramon?” and he heard his name and turned around, and sure enough.
His face was quizzical at first, and then brightened into a smile when he recognized me. There was no hint that any tension had ever existed between us. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and my heart was filled with strange feeling. He was considerably changed, after all these years. His hair had thinned greatly and had turned a pale sort of gray and stuck straight up, unmanageable, from a pink scalp. His eyelashes were so white as to be almost invisible, and his eyes, obvious even in the riverside dive where I was eating, were a pale and wonderful color of morning blue. What was unchanged, unless now it was more exaggerated, was that wonderful perpetual look of near-adolescent surprise in his raised eyebrows, an innocent childlike joy in what age had revealed as boyish jug ears and big Adam’s apple. He seemed much paler than he had ever been, and softer I should say, no longer the ex-quarterback but simply a middle-aged man in shirtsleeves. His shirt front was open three or four buttons down, as it had been when I last saw him—but now not from vanity, only carelessness of grooming. His pale, bare, almost hairless chest was a part of his boyishness. The shirt was soiled, his shoes were run down, his neck was dirty, his shirt collar was folded under on one side. And yet in a way he looked wonderful to me, a relaxed, noncompetitive version of himself.
Though the two of them, he and the barmaid, had been going over his bill for mistakes, it was clear this was a friendly conversation and that both were enjoying themselves. Even in jeans and loafers and a flowered shirt, I felt overdressed and inappropriate and “grown-up” in his presence. He was still a boy, uncorrupted and hungry for, well, for what I didn’t know. Hungry to meet each new minute of the world and test it for danger and adventure, as he had always done back when I knew Ramon in school and in Florida.
Suddenly the comfort I felt in my love of Annie and the comfort of our home seemed anemic and pale by comparison to what I remembered as I looked at him. I recalled feelings of passion and joy that my present comfort suddenly could not match. I was afraid I had forgotten what it meant to be hungry for art or sex or whatever else we had been hungry for back in those good days. Alive is what I had felt then, mere satisfaction was what I was capable of now. Just how much I had loved life during those years came flooding back to me with such sudden force I felt tears well up in my eyes. The loss of that part of my past had never impressed me at all before, I had pushed it away from the front of my thoughts, in favor of more extravagant losses. Those years had seemed simply a way station on the road to whatever destiny was to have been mine, this tour I’d just finished, a little shopping and good food with my wife. Now the past overwhelmed me like a flood. I had been so young, my God, newly married to my first wife at the time. Suddenly I wanted to call her—my first wife, I mean, Elizabeth. I wanted to say I was sorry and also to thank her for going with me on that adventure. I could see her face as if it were yesterday. I saw the little cubbyhole where we had lived so happily, where I sat at a big typewriter in the bedroom and pecked out drafts of sentences long lost to me. I loved life back then, that was the thing. I hadn’t realized I loved it so much. I even loved the unhappy parts. It was all life, we didn’t try to fix the bad, we just sucked it in like the rest.
I was shocked to find myself comparing unfavorably the love I felt for Annie to the urgency of feeling I had known back then, not just for Elizabeth, for everything. Nothing today seemed to mean as much. Even Annie, for whom my heart had been so full only minutes before, began to pale as a recent memory. Ramon had somehow gotten a break in playwriting and acting since I had last seen him, and I learned from the overheard conversation with the barmaid that he had directed Hair on Broadway. Hair, my God, that was in another century, wasn’t it? Well, actually, it almost was another century. That’s how long it had been since I last saw or heard of him.
He said, “Buddy?” His head was cocked to the side, like a question mark.
“Oh my God,” I said, and stood up and we embraced right there among the oyster shells.
The barmaid smiled warmly at us, until Ramon turned to her with his beatifying smile and handed her a wad of money and said, “Oh fuck the bill, just take what I owe and keep some for yourself.” He winked at me, “I ought to make this bum here pay it.” The barmaid took his money and waved her handsome tip under both of our noses and handed him back what remained. She patted him twice on the butt as she turned back to her work.
I said, “I can’t believe you recognized me.” I meant this. Not only was I older, I hadn’t yet grown my beard when I last saw Ramon.
He said, “I’ve seen your picture around. You’re doing well.”
We sat in the booth and talked for a very long time. I asked about Rabbit and Margaret Ann. I told him about the divorce from Elizabeth, my marriage to Annie. I eventually got around to telling him about Robin’s death, and then told him how Erik was getting along, about his serving in the army during the Gulf war. I showed him a photo in my wallet. In it Erik’s blond hair is almost to his waist. The photograph has caught him in the middle of a big laugh. “Everyone should enjoy life as much as Erik,” I told Ramon. “He’s a social worker in Maryland now, gave me my first grandchild this year.”
Ramon and Margaret Ann were divorced, I learned. He had lost job after job in New York until they finally moved out of the city to try to get a grip on their lives. He had finally had one of those operations he’d always wanted, a heart valve I think. He was cheerful enough about his difficulties and I detected no self-pity, just the same wonderful, energetic, hypochondriacal Ramon.
“Do you live in New Orleans?” I asked.
“Oh Lord no,” he said. “We’ve been in Iowa City for twenty years. I still teach at the same community college where they took me in after my last misadventure in New York. The class load is easy, and they let me do some directing. It’s a good deal.”
He was in New Orleans for only a couple of days, to settle the estate of an aged aunt who had died and left a small inheritance. “Margaret Ann lives in Cedar Rapids, so I see her every week. Nothing has really changed with us, you know, except that we’re not married. She even cleans up my house about once a month, when she can’t stand looking at it anymore. Harris—we stopped calling him Rabbit, oh, a long time ago—and his wife come down from Winnipeg a couple of times a year.”
This is the way we went on for a while, about ourselves. I began to ask of the whereabouts of some of our old classmates. Ramon had kept up with our old friends better than I had. Tim and Ellie were divorced, he said, Ellie was now married to one of the Billips millionaires, one of the oil tycoons up in the Delta. Jonesy was dead, heart attack ten years ago, but Rebecca was doing great, living in Birmingham now, doing some kind of civil rights work. He went through the roll call of classmates and filled me in on those he knew about. Then he mentioned Elizabeth’s friend, Twyla.
“You remember Twyla!” I exclaimed.
He said that he remembered my telling him about her, back in Alabama. He had made a point of calling her, getting to know her, after the “flap” between the two of us. His plan had been to poison her mind against me, maybe sleep with her a few times, he had been so angry and so embarrassed after he left the farmhouse.
I said, “This can’t be true. You kept up with Twyla all these years?”
“Well, first,” he said, “I never slept with her. She wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Second, she and that guy she was married to finally had a kid, a boy. They got divorced, eventually, but she had this kid with him before that happened. I met the kid once, when he was about three.”
I said, “Did you actually ‘poison her mind’ against me?”
He said, “Oh, sure, you bet. I had her hating your guts before I got through with her.” He laughed a genuine laugh, as if we were sharing a joke, and finally I had to laugh too.
I harbored no ill will against Ramon. We went back so many years, had shared so much. It was typical of him to go to such lengths in a competition—what he saw as a competition—and in a weird way this was the type of nutty excess that I found myself loving about him over the years, even when I his target.
What I didn’t expect was the fullness of feeling that welled up in me at the sound of the name of Twyla. I was brought up short. She might as well have appeared before me as an apparition, so vivid, indeed so enchanting was her memory. More than ever the extravagance of my feeling for her—and not just for her, for all those days of urgency and drama—flooded in on me.
And suddenly I realized I was still in love with this woman.
This might seem impossible after so long a time, but it was true. The overpowering, visceral memory of old feeling seemed in this moment a definition of love, and immediately I wondered whether all that I had felt over the years, and even those feelings of only an hour ago, were not a lie. I held this thought to myself and said nothing to Ramon right away, though he must have known.
He told me that she had remarried and was “sort of retired now,” to recall his words. He knew that she had finished her major in English and had taught literature for a long time at the same private high school where her husband worked.
I said, “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Twyla? The hippie girl? The nymphomaniac?”
He said oh yes, the same.
I said, “Retired? My God, that’s right, that could be true.”
She could have taught thirty years since then. She would be in her fifties now. I hadn’t considered that she would be a middle-aged woman, that she might look different. I had imagined only her slender legs and arms, the blond hair that fell over her shoulders to her hips, her sexual talk. Was she wizened now, was her voice crackly, had the veins of her hands turned purple, her skin become papery and loose as crepe? I hadn’t weathered the years so well myself; who knew what had happened to Twyla.
Ramon waited just the right interval before he said quietly, “She is still the same. She is still heartbreakingly beautiful.”
There was one other thing he still had to tell me. He seemed to have been waiting for this final revelation, as if all the rest of our conversation had been the setup for what was now to follow. I forced a suspicion out of my mind that my old friend Ramon was getting something more out of our meeting than I had taken into account. I slapped away the brief suspicion that this meeting in New Orleans was not as accidental as it at first had seemed. Alarms went off in my head, as the saying goes, I knew I should be careful. No matter. I was not cautious in the slightest degree. Insight was worthless to me. I had to know more, I had to talk about her, to recall every detail of the affair, to tell Ramon that I had secretly loved her for all these years, even to tell him about Susan, who had been a kind of pale substitute for Twyla, so that I might hear at least an echo of those long-dormant feelings once again. I was ready to beg him to tell me that she had left her second husband, that he was dead, that she spoke of me. I released all hold on good sense.
I had to get in touch with her, no matter where she was, no matter what miraculous bridges Annie and I had, over the last several years, built back across the chasm to our marriage, no matter what affection and trust and spiritual connection must be sacrificed to do so, no matter that the transformation and forgiveness we had pieced together in our painful alliance since the affair with Susan might be undone. I told Ramon everything. I poured out my heart. I told him how, with Susan, I had felt alive, exactly as I had with Twyla. With the two of them every feeling, even the disastrous ones, seemed part of an adventure that made life bearable, that made tragedy into exquisite melodrama and therefore tolerable, a pain worth experiencing as often as possible.
The word comfort to describe any part of love, which was the expression constantly on my tongue these days, never came to mind back then. Comfort had meant nothing in those days. Or maybe I was looking for comfort and only called it by another name.
Suddenly I realized I loved this woman elaborately, incautiously, indeed madly.
He said, “She lives just across Lake Pontchartrain, you know.”
I looked at Ramon. His face did not reveal anything beneath its surface. He was an excellent actor. I managed to wonder fleetingly whether Ramon had some emotional stake in seeing my marriage unravel and fall apart, as I suddenly felt it might be doing. I wondered whether the collapse of my life’s happiness were not a challenge of some sort to him, a particularly difficult scene he had suddenly become determined to master. I felt a loose string or two in my emotional fabric, and I picked and yanked at them without caution.
I said, “She does? She lives on the Coast?”
I said, “She does?”
I ENDED MY CONVERSATION with Ramon quickly and scurried back to the hotel. My hands shook so violently I almost tore the pages of the phone book. I didn’t care how he knew these things, I didn’t consider again any motive he might have, any manipulations he might be involved in. Bay St. Louis, I found the town, I found the number, her husband’s name, which Ramon had provided. I lifted the phone from the cradle and pressed at the numbers on the dial before me. She answered and her voice was the youthful music of my memory, and my feelings were exactly as if our last stolen grieving kisses had been yesterday. Twice, early in the conversation, I had to hold the phone away from my mouth and take deep breaths so that I was able to talk. I remembered with what ease her touch, her voice on a telephone had, all those years ago, been able to take my breath away. I spoke her name, I told her who I was. It occurred to me what a ruinous path I seemed all too willing to take.
Except that I was so breathless with emotion at our reunion the conversation began normally in every way. Her voice held all of the old music and something else as well, a quality of speech I had forgotten about, a distance I would say, as if she were mildly amused at everything we were saying, an ironic distance from the contents of our words. I asked whether she was free to talk, and she said, “Oh, yes, Albert is out on the boat.”
Something in the way she said the final phrase of her reply struck me as sarcastic, somehow, a tone I took to be a put-down of her husband and an invitation of sorts to me.
I said, “I’d love to see you.”
She said, “Oh, well, see me, ah.” She had placed a similar emphasis on words in that sentence as well, and I was baffled as to how to interpret her meaning. Eventually she said, “I don’t look like I used to.”
I said, “I don’t care.” I meant this, but there was that odd sarcasm again, if sarcasm indeed was the point.
It took me a while to understand that she had gone mad.
Madness I realize is an old-fashioned term. Schizophrenia, depression, personality disorder, agoraphobia, even Alzheimer’s I suppose—anything was possible. I don’t know what name to give to her sad condition. She had lost her mind. That was all I knew, and that was irrefutable. Some things she said made sense and seemed true; others were quite insane. Her son was dead. The story was shocking. Twyla’s son had been the postal worker in Pensacola who one day took a rifle and murdered his supervisor and a coworker and then turned the gun on himself. I remembered reading about the incident when it happened, but seven or eight years had passed, so the memory was vague. I got no other details than this, for she was weeping piteously by this time in the conversation. The broad outline of the tragedy was all that I could make out through the weeping, which itself sounded less like emotion than like a rote demonstration of emotion. I wondered if my own tears, those years ago, had seemed so false. She wept easily, but I could tell even over the phone that this crying was not cathartic or helpful or even interesting to her, but rather like something done in a habitual trance, like peeling potatoes or shelling peas or knitting. I continued with the conversation, which now began veering off into unexpected tangents because I think I still had not been willing to believe fully the extent of her deterioration. She spoke of alien abductions as if they were as commonplace as the weather. She seemed to believe that her late son now lived on a spaceship. All this was said in that amazing voice of hers, honest to God like silver bells at times, and tinged with her strange irony, sometimes sarcasm, so I was unable to determine which parts of her story she actually believed and which she considered to be an inside joke between the two of us. She was a complete hermit, I finally figured out this much. She saw no one, she never moved from her house. She did keep a telephone handy for emergencies—her husband had insisted upon it—and she seemed to think her late son might someday try to reach her from his new home—the mothership, to use her phrase. She had not one friend anywhere on earth who knew where she was (I don’t really know whether this was true, I don’t see how it could have been, if Ramon had managed to keep up with her, even in a cursory way). Her husband, she believed, hated her, though it was obvious from everything else she said that this could not be true. He had moved out, it was true, but he had not fully abandoned her. He had made a sort of separate peace finally and now lived alone on a houseboat or yacht or some such vessel, moored in a harbor in Bay St. Louis, a few miles from the house. He came in each day to check on her, bring her things, gifts, trinkets, movies, groceries. Each day he stayed for a while, cleaned up the house a little, prepared some food for her to eat, and then went back to whatever life he had made for himself.
I ended the conversation in despair and confusion. I looked at the furnishings of my hotel room and, though I had been on the road for seven weeks, I did not believe I could tolerate another moment without my wife. Without her the world seemed ready to fly into chaos. She was the completion of me. Without her anything could happen, there would be no protection. I wept for what I had lost, for my fathers, for my sons, for Elizabeth, for Annie whom I threw away once and had seemed ready to throw away again, my God. Could I have almost allowed this to happen again, even after all we had suffered and come through together? I had felt changed, transformed forever by the truth, and yet I seemed still only to be the impulsive child ready to dive onto his head into unconsciousness for no better motive than a new TV. I was still the monster who had tried to shoot his father through the window, who set an infant on a strange horse, and fucked a woman with an Amazing Technicolor Fucking Machine. I wept for the demon whose face was my own. I wept for the burden of my inner midget, whom I recognized now as an eternal assurance that I was all alone in the world, and would be so forever, without my wife this was true, anyway. I wept for Ramon’s health and for Margaret Ann and for poor dead Jonesy and Rebecca and Susan and my mad old lover Twyla and really, as corny and untrue as it may sound, for all the world of woman and man. During this phone conversation with Twyla, I never brought up the name of my son or the awful circumstances of his death. I thought of doing so, but I just didn’t. What was the point? Especially what was the point if I had learned nothing from it of the value of faithful love? I didn’t bring up the name of Ramon, either, though I would have been glad to have someone with whom to discuss his motives, even someone as crazy as Twyla. Could his motives have been so complex, his manipulations so profound, his heart so unkind? Were my motives and manipulations any less unkind, I who had once survived such demons and managed to keep a wife’s love? I wept for everyone, for all the madness in the world, for murderers, for suicides, for divorce, for fathers and sons, and for that reckless stunted creature, that sickness inside myself, that put into jeopardy the fragile souls of those most dear to me, and allowed me to call my actions by the holy name of love.