Her name was Faye Berger. She taught at Columbia University—“comp lit” was what she called the stuff she taught—and she met Thomas back in January, one afternoon when the wind and the snow were coming down so hard, she took shelter in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Oceania wing was empty, there was nobody but a man who’d been staring at Polynesian canoes for so long that she ended up going over and asking him if he was thinking of crossing the Atlantic with that kind of boat.
He just gave her a smile and it was his eyes that stopped her, those brown eyes with bits of gold in them and that face with its nose and wrinkles and lines almost like a woman’s. He was tan like a sailor who’d been at sea for months. She said seeing him gave her a feeling she’d never been able to put her finger on, that it felt like she’d met him before and he’d been waiting for her by the slanting glass windows. He was so calm, and it was nothing like the heavy wind hitting the panes and the whistling she could hear outside. She took that stranger back to her place: her mother had taught her to always be safe but she decided to forget all that, she wasn’t a girl anymore. They stayed up the whole night talking. She wanted to know what brought him down to the Lower 48 and then from one end of it to the other, and what he’d seen along the way.
He told her about the flat, dry stretches of land after snowy tundras, the grassy plains after the mountains, the deserts, and the cities with their silvery spikes, the WASPs and African Americans and Mexicans and Japanese who were all more American than he was, with names of every kind that made him think of Asia, the Middle East, Europe, food made from scratch and vegetables picked in the fields at dawn.
He also told her things I didn’t know: that he couldn’t stay in the same place, like some fruit that fell from a tree, since life was a constant stream: it could be a trickle or a torrent, but it was always flowing toward other things, other places, other people, other lives. He said he’d lived in the same place for so long that, nowadays, just feeling the wind when he ran or on long bus trips was enough to make him happy. He wanted to keep going and going and going, he didn’t ever want to stop. Faye said it looked like he was running away and that when people go somewhere else, they’re just dragging their problems along, no matter what they are, and that there are ways to solve them without having to cross a continent.
That made Thomas burst out laughing. He told her that, back home, our father would have sooner drowned a shrink in the lake with a big rock tied around his ankles than let a single member of his family get “psychologized.” Thomas wasn’t running away. He was hunting out new images, views he’d never seen before, so that he could give his mind something to stand in for the things he loved best, something to fill all the empty space and push out all the rest, the darkness, everything terrible about life. He wanted as much beauty as possible so there wouldn’t be any ugliness left in his head.
All those things that Faye told me that night didn’t feel one bit real. I almost couldn’t make out my own brother in those words, but maybe we never really do know people. And the more I think on it now, I still don’t know whether he was running away from something. All I know is not even that city and the people living in it could keep him in one place.