Chapter 7

His month in France was a joy to the point that he later wondered why he came home. In every respect it was a feast for his senses and his naturally quizzical impulses. He had had a year of the French language but remembered next to nothing though a little seeped in from the past. It didn’t seem to matter because all the French, at least in Paris, seemed to have enough English to bail him out of his minimal difficulties. An artist friend had told him about a wonderful room in a little hotel on Rue Vaneau which was near Rue de Sèvres and Rue de Babylone and only a couple of blocks from the Invalides, a handy landmark. There were small city maps free at the hotel desk and he was never without one. He got it out so frequently that it only lasted a few days before it would turn into soft pulp. He got into navigational trouble one day when he forgot his reading glasses and the map became a blur. He finally asked an old lady in a small park who gave him directions in clear English. They spoke a few moments and out came that she had been married to a soldier from Chicago. She lived with him there until the 1960s when he died and she moved home. She said she was tough because her parents were Basques. He didn’t know what that meant but asked around and later found out. She took his shoulders and aimed him north toward the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper on Montparnasse. From then on he would use the building as a beacon when he was confused. It was easy to take the proper right turn well before he reached the skyscraper.

Paris seemed to agree with his notion of glimpses. He walked hundreds of streets in the first two weeks until he got bad shin splints from walking on cement which his legs were unused to. He had to take a few days off, mostly made up of hot baths. He bought a pair of thick soft-soled shoes at Bon Marché and consequently discovered the immense food court on that floor. That helped. He skipped restaurants for a while. In the morning he’d buy the Tribune, have coffee, and then go into the food court, buy bread, a few cheeses out of the hundred they had, some pâté, salmon, and several kinds of herring. He vowed he would someday live nearby and cook in his own apartment out of this marvelous and expensive store. They had a big wine department but he preferred the small wine store across the street where he had gotten to know a friendly clerk. One day he bought on impulse a large double magnum of Mouton Rothschild but couldn’t figure out what to do with such a large bottle so he took it to a dinner at his publisher’s home who doubtless thought “Crazy American” and hid it from his current guests with glee. “A wine for the proper occasion,” he said.

France brought back glimpses of his life of travel in the years when he was ever so slowly writing his most ambitious novel, screenplays, and also informal outdoor essays for Sports Illustrated. He went to Russia with a friend but their KGB guide didn’t want him to write anything about Russian horse racing. He went to one race and saw Iron Jaw win. On the way home he stopped in France and wrote a piece about a stag hunt near a friend’s family château. Of course he had never stayed in a château before but was comfortable as had been Richard III who had stayed there during the invasion of France. One evening he and his friend ate a wild piglet stuffed with truffles.

The same year, he and his wife went to Africa with the same friend and his wife, a grand trip. His biggest thrill was not the mammals, which he had seen so much of on television and in the movies, but the birds. Every bird in Africa was a bird he had never seen before including the large martial eagle who occasionally feeds on hyenas that weigh 150 pounds, just like Mongolian golden eagles can kill wolves. You imagine them dropping out of the sky the weight of a frozen turkey with huge talons. Bang. About anything is dead. He dreamed of returning to Africa simply to bird-watch by himself. He also traveled to Ecuador for a sporting magazine to catch a striped marlin on a fly rod. He succeeded finally on a later trip to Costa Rica.

Perhaps the most momentous trip in terms of long-range effect was a month in Brazil to research a screenplay for a producer. The constant presence of the music of Brazil seeped into the soul and could be recalled anytime. The thousands of beach girls were also memorable, their shapely bodies maintained by the endless physical beach games they play. One day he joined the tail end of an anti–nuclear weapons march led by a hot samba band. Everyone was dancing and he did the best he could. Finally one austere older woman, the soul of dignity, joined him and helped with dance steps. Afterward he asked if she would like to have a drink. She answered that if she had a drink with a strange man her husband would cut his throat. He found out later that many husbands in Brazil have the nasty habit of killing their wives. Farther north he loved the big former slave port of Bahia which was even more, if that was possible, musically saturated than Rio. It was intoxication without alcohol or drugs. Every kid sitting on a park bench strumming seemed better than any quartet he’d ever heard in the United States. In Bahia music was their life. There was no other. Maybe music was the only way to subdue the smothering poverty. You kept thinking of the music, the Atlantic Ocean in front of you, the night sky that opened people up rather than closing them. The dancing was ceaseless and he suddenly envied these people who danced every day rather than occasionally. More than once during his month he thought he might move there.

One grotesquely snowy December morning in Paris years before he had sat at his studio desk staring at an assortment of poems written since the last book of poetry three years before. This was when it was thirty rather than fifty years since he wrote his first poem while reading John Keats. Of course the poem was doggerel and he had known it immediately. He thought of the thousands and thousands of hours he had spent on poems since that calling at age fourteen. “Calling” is sort of a theological term, as people feel called to the ministry, and is less true of writing, but he knew he had made a lifetime commitment. He was standing on the roof of the house in the middle of the night at fourteen, staring at the Milky Way which seemed to stare back with its fabulous plenitude. Now staring at the snow thirty years later, he thought that his prose fiction seemed more of an afterthought though he read a great deal of it. He had to write and there were long periods of time when he didn’t have a poem ready to arrive. René Char, a French poet he worshipped, had said about writing poetry, “You have to be there when bread comes fresh from the oven.” You had to live your life in a state of readiness for the poem even though it could very well be a month or two between poems. Another pet obsession of his though not much believed in the cramped world of poetry was that every poet is obligated to read everything published in poetry through time, no matter from what country or time period. He spent years and years doing so. How could you write if you weren’t familiar with what was best in the history of the world? He went fishing and camping with friends at the cabin on the lake where they brought piles of sex magazines to read while he had only anthologies of Chinese and Russian poetry. He didn’t mind being teased about it because he was the biggest and strongest of the group and they went only so far in their teasing for fear of getting their asses kicked. He was an utterly nonviolent farm kid and just looked threatening because of his musculature from a life of hard work whether bucking hay bales in tall stacks, unloading fertilizer trucks, or laying out irrigation pipe in the fields.

Recently while sitting in his studio watching his wife, a shapely woman indeed, work in the garden he had a few minutes of absolute happiness. He couldn’t remember his last one, other than catching a five-pound brown trout in a local river. But this one was more solid and overwhelming. What happened was that he had a rapprochement with her after several years of growing distance.

It all started with smoking. She had had a severe asthma attack and spent a week at a hospital in Tucson. Her asthma was bad enough that she could no longer be in the company of anyone smoking cigarettes. Whenever he spent time in the house he was sequestered in his office, taping black plastic sheeting across the louver over the door. He was already claustrophobic and his dismal space considerably upped the ante. He couldn’t face it, in fact. Maybe he would quit smoking. But then his singular success had been the seven weeks around spinal surgery. The surgeon told him for the sake of his healing bones he shouldn’t drink or smoke for those seven weeks. He played the role of the hero and somehow managed without cheating.

They merged again one evening sitting on the porch swing watching fireflies and the thousands of stars above them, idly moving the swing back and forth with their feet. The night was unbearably beautiful with the constellations speaking their own strange language to each other. He told her he thought it might be the uninvented language used by Jesus and the Buddha to speak to each other.

“What a wonderful thought. I have to tell you something unpleasant. Your friend Ralph in town died this afternoon. I waited because I didn’t want to tell you while you were enjoying your favorite lasagna dinner. His daughter is there on a visit. You should call her now.”

He broke down weeping. He sobbed, in fact, thinking that his friend might have died of a heart attack while trying to pull the cork from a recalcitrant bottle of wine. He wasn’t very strong. The two of them had recently been corresponding about Chinese poetry and he had begun to think of Ralph as his only true friend.

His wife held him and they sat there an hour vomiting up their souls, saying everything that was possible to say about their multiple faults that had kept them apart. Finally they made love to the obnoxious music of mosquitoes on the wooden floor of the porch.