In Milwaukee, I rented a car and began driving north. It was afternoon, icy and gray. On the passenger seat, books that had been my favorites, so long ago, that I still admire—Cortázar, Wittgenstein, Hemingway—along with the journals of Charles Burchfield, my grandfather’s Hollow Tree, and Shurtleff’s Audition (“Start with the question: What is my relationship to this other character in the scene I am about to do? Facts are never enough, although they will help you begin . . . You must go further, into the realm of the emotions”).
I checked the dashboard clock and thought of my daughters—at their gymnastics and hip hop dance classes, two time zones away; I wondered if they missed me, if they were thinking of me. Their school was in session, but for me it was Spring Break. And so I’d set out on this trip, explaining to my wife that it was essential that I experience that peninsula in the winter, something I’d never done. Besides, I had research funds to spend.
My phone, plugged into the car’s stereo, played music I’d first heard over twenty years before, that I favored during that summer of Mrs. Abel. I listened as Lucinda Williams sang and it was as if I were back in the Red Cabin with the rain lashing the slanted, tar-papered roof. The strings swelled; her voice ratcheted up:
I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs
I just stood and looked out at the open space and a farmhouse out a ways
And I wondered about the people who lived in it
And I wondered if they were happy and content.
The music also took me back to my adobe house in Mount Pleasant, after that summer; there, I had been so lonely that I had raised loneliness to the highest of attributes, completely necessary if one were to do anything worthwhile, or become someone, to become world in oneself, to draw another person to you and have them not be disappointed.
I drifted back further, to the drive east with my ex-girlfriend, a hundred cassette tapes on the floorboards at our feet (Again, I am not good enough to write about you, I said in one of the letters. I never did you justice when you were around and now you’re so far away!). I drove, just south of Green Bay, with Two Rivers and Manitowoc and Sheboygan behind me. An oncoming car’s headlights blinded me for a moment, and then my vision returned.
This girlfriend wrote me not long ago, by email:
Don’t worry. Your letters are safe, now; they’re under my desk at home.
I responded:
I’m relieved. Though I’ve been remembering things, since I read them—like one time in Livingston when there was some kind of fair/circus in town and you got really wigged out at night that a clown was running alongside the house.
I have NO MEMORY of the clown. My memory is ridiculous—sometimes I think it’s having kids that did it to me, that makes it impossible to remember. PLEASE elaborate.
Anyway, it was just early on when we’d moved into the house and there was some kind of traveling carnival that we decided not to attend, but then later, much later, you either couldn’t sleep or had a bad dream and woke up quite upset and worried about the possibility of a clown or clowns being outside the window or running back and forth along the house. That’s all I remember. I was thinking, “Whoa!” but was kind of excited, too, about this possibility, though you were quite beset and seriously distraught. Maybe, I wonder now, you weren’t all the way awake? I don’t really remember what we said or did the next morning, but I think things went back to normal. I do remember you being really upset about the clown thing, though. Sorry if I was not more understanding or sympathetic.
Wow I have no memory of that at all!! But thank you. Don’t worry, if you wrote about us, and I read it, I’d probably think it was about someone who was not me. But now I am more like you were then I think. You’d be amazed how much true stuff I put in Mad Men without anyone noticing. Nothing much about you, though.
Nothing much?
You’d have to watch closely.
What did you mean “But now I am more like you were then I think.”
Ha. I meant that at the time I was wilder, messier. I was full of lust and dissatisfaction and questions. I always had this image of fire consuming everything I tried to write. Like the break-fire from Young Men and Fire. Now I am better at working and discovering my work, I am more thoughtful and solitary, more open to the world and closed to myself.
Ah, it is me, now, who is more like you were then.