Safety and Dread

This is the view I grew up with, the view from the living room of my childhood summerhouse. The view is still unchanged for the most part, but you have have to walk behind a row of condos built across the lagoon to see it these days. Soon that drawbridge, with its see-through grate over the water, will be replaced by a higher, sleeker span, but this view will always be the view of possibility to me, the view of my childhood imagination, marshland up against mainland, a causeway across wide bay.

Here's a segment from "Safety and Dread," an essay i wrote two or three years ago published in the magazine Arts and Letters. These paragraphs don't exactly describe the view, but they want to say a little about the place and the house subordinate to that view.

from "Safety and Dread"

The boy spends his summers by the water. The house is small, only ten feet away from a lagoon. It's on filled marshland, no more than a foot or so above sea level, as are the other houses on the island. That seems crucial to his attraction. During new moon nights the water actually pours gently over the bulkhead and pools in the yard before it recedes, leaving reeds that must be raked the next morning. He loves those nights. He feels alive in them. The water tells him he is only partly in control, everything he cares for here--the house, the deck atop the roof from which he can see the lights of Ocean City and the causeways--could we swept away overnight. And he's reminded of that fact when tropical storm warnings come in. But even when he and his brothers spend the day putting the nice furniture atop tables, just in case the water makes it in, it's mostly an occasion for excitement. What should they take to the shelter? Will the dog be okay if she stays all night in the car? The truth is, he and his family do not expect to lose one thing, and frankly there'd be a little excitement if they did, say, if the Russian olives blew down, or the glass in the lamppost cracked. They’d get a new lamppost. The kind of damage he saw to the houses across the bay on the beach, when he was all of three--the houses wrenched off their pilings, the bathroom fixtures overturned in what was left of a dune--was simply a fluke. They were safe from such things.

One could probably guess that this particularly imaginative engagement must satisfy some lack. And it’s true. While he understands his father’s pride in the Cherry Hill house, where his family lives during the school year, the boy must know on some level that he feels choked inside it. It’s not that the house seems to have been built to impress the relatives, neighbors, and coworkers; rather, that it’s completely turned in on itself. Walnut paneled rooms, brick, lamps, darkness, and walls, walls, walls, walls, windows that don’t even look at anything but lawn. The house does not love the outside. The house does not notice birds and plants and trees. The house only looks inward at the life inside the house; that’s all there is—oh, narcissistic house, shaping the speech and gestures of the family it holds. And no wonder the boy takes off on three-mile bike rides to model houses when he gets bored. No wonder he practically ticks off the days when they’re back at the summer house, and he’s standing in the living room and looking out at the bright bay, and what’s that out there? Little red thing. Channel marker? Buoy? Boat? Yes, boat. What kind? Fishing boat. Fishing boat heading to the inlet, then out to sea. Another life. Out there and away. Outside the family that can sometimes be too close, too wrapped up in one another’s business. Where there’s too much love and expectation. Here, by water, even his mother loosens up; she’s sillier, more playful. As part of a nightly ritual she gives his brothers change to buy candy at Hyatt’s drugstore, across the causeway. Then they might go to the boardwalk. The dream of unregulated space, all the usual rules suspended. The boy knows his mother’s revival has something to with water, horizon, and the great big sky over it all. She sits on the deck, alert, spine straighter, shoulders back, and she doesn’t snap as often as she might in the other house.

And so this water, over time, becomes something to wish for, a way to know himself. The motion of it, the rising and fall of it, the way it refuses to be contained within borders--that's where meaning lies. That's how he knows his body, that's how he thinks and sees and feels. Truth be told, he feels a little sick when he’s but twenty miles inland, no joke, and in subtle ways he does what he can to dissuade his father from the vacations he wants to take far away from the coasts. Why not Florida? the boy says. Let’s go to Cape Cod. Here, Rehoboth Beach. And maybe his father’s insistence on taking trips to the mountains—miles and hundreds of miles from tides, marshes, and beaches—has something to do with the boy’s ongoing carsickness. There he is, lying on the backseat, trying not to look at the orange bucket in the seat well, using all his will to hold back the urge to come undone. And much later, when he starts to write fiction as an undergraduate, the notion of a fluid identity--struggling against it, trying not to struggle against it--becomes the subject of his work, though he might not name it to himself that way. He does know that when he hits a dry patch in his writing, all he needs to do is reference the body of water out back; seriously, he's always putting bodies of water out back, or at least marshes or swamps, and he feels so much better when he does. The work comes alive; it moves in ways he wouldn’t have predicted. And when he comes to read Butler and other theorists when he's older, not to mention To the Lighthouse and The Waves, books he loves, he knows he's found one of his subjects. Fluid identity: To be one thing one day, and something else the next; to be one thing one minute. The capaciousness of that point of view, the generosity, the pressure of conformity and coherence gone. And we’re not just talking about desire and self-presentation, but the kind of writer he might become. A writer who works in different genres and registers of diction, whose paragraphs might rise toward the lyric and recede. Rise and recede. Collage, fragment, shift in point of view—anything but the tyranny of the linear, as he’s called it in one book, which he does try to write from time to time, but strict chronology, the one foot in front of the next, never feels like him. There are other writers to take care of that. But leap backward in time—or forward? Wriggle out of its skin? Now we’re talking.

Who was it who said that the thing that saves you can also do you in? If I'm remembering clearly, the medium in which I came to thrive almost did me in not once, twice, but--how many times did I almost drown as a kid, and kept running back in, even though I knew what it was like to feel my lungs expand, my eyes burning until I couldn’t keep them open? To feel the slap on the back once I was out, the coughing for air, the soreness inside my nostrils and chest, the relief. Maybe some tears hidden behind a hand. And the desire to go back in. Not instantly, but twenty minutes, a half-hour. It's one of my earliest memories, the one that stands in for a whole set of years. And even as a grownup, bodysurfing, and dashing into the slope of the Long Island shoreline with such force that one could imagine what it’s like to break the back in two. And the forearms, torn up and bleeding from scudding up against pebbles and broken shells. This is what I can’t get out of my head: the percentage of the human body that’s water. Bone is 22%, body fat 25, lean muscle 75. And blood, the winner, which comes in 83%, contains the same concentration of minerals and trace elements as seawater, as well as the same sodium content. When we go back in, we’re only meeting ourselves. Safety and dread. It was never anything different. And what do we make of that?

To Do (Or: A Veritable Poem)

There's a section of Famous Builder called "New World" in which I reproduce one of my father's infamous to do lists. The list was a largely a composite of memories. But I couldn't help copying down his current to do list, which he'd left out on the kitchen counter. The sheer velocity of tasks makes the Famous Builder list look quaint. It is a veritable poem.

Clean basement
Repair toilet floor
Replace electric outlets
Replace electric wire
Wash windows
Raise porch
Check bulkhead and possible hydraulic cement patch
Fix fence gate
Put street patch in
Fix rear gate
Strengthen gate
Paint and repair fence
Release water from sailboat
Grout shed window
Replace board on shed
Paint shed
Fix (incomprehensible) and extend
Window door replacement quote
Power wash fence behind shed

My father is 86-years old. As Ned and I left the shore house for the city last night, he was still on the second item of this list--though this isn't meant to suggest he's not going strong. That is one recalcitrant toilet floor.

I walked in on this scene two days ago. Ned to the left, my father to the right.

The Museum of My Mother

--A rattan lamp with upward curving spokes at the base
--A olive-green Melmac plate rimmed with soft yellow flowers
--An official Uncola glass, wider at the bottom than it is on top
--A faded box of unused Wash 'n Dri marked $1.29
--A pastel sketch of a basket of apples, oranges, and bananas, with grapefruit and knife in the foreground
--A bureau lamp with a bright-green night light resembling...what? A lighthouse? A channel marker?

Remnants of the 60s, remnants of the 70s and 80s: objects my mother bought from Two Guys, Bradlees, Mr. Big, Clover, House and Garden. They were for a summer house, after all, and casual was the point. Could she have known that these offhand pieces would come to stand for her? She loved this house and its view of the lagoon, its nearness to the bay and bridges. It is ghosted with her now, but it is a friendly ghost, a calming, interested ghost. I like getting to spend time with her again, even if the exterior electric-blue she insisted on seven years ago--we didn't yet know that she was losing her mind--still makes me turn my head away.

Backing Up

Last Friday night, I was in my friend Marie's car, headed to a book party uptown. I was a little in awe of her ability to drive up Seventh Avenue, to actually look and comment on the buildings on Seventh Avenue, unflustered. When I'm driving in the city, I think I'm gripping the steering wheel harder than it needs to be gripped. I'm looking straight ahead; I'm expecting a pedestrian to leap out in front of me, or a taxi to smash into the left taillight. It isn't fun, but for Marie it is fun--or sort of. She says the only way you can drive in Manhattan is by thinking of it as a game. Alongside Bryant Park, a city bus pulled right into our lane, and Marie would not let that driver get his way. She broke his path, leaned over me so she could achieve eye contact with the bus driver--was it the evil eye? let's just say it was the Marie Eye--and, sure enough, the driver let her go ahead of him.

I tried to think of Marie as I was driving on West 17th this morning. Ned and I had just left the apartment to visit my father and to stay for a few days at Anchorage Point, in the summerhouse of my childhood. It occurred to me that the truck ahead of us hadn't moved in ten minutes. Then it occurred to me that the two police vehicles blocking the truck ahead of us weren't going to move any time soon. Something was wrong, and I knew something was incredibly wrong when I looked in the rearview and saw the school bus behind me backing up toward Eighth Avenue with yellow flashers. For some reason, the idea of backing up down a deep city block is plain ghastly. It is as ghastly for me as it is for Ned to go down three flights of stairs in our building, which is why he freezes at the top of the landing unless you pick him him. Alas, there was no one around to do the dirty deed, but it is amazing to see what some adrenaline can do: I backed down the street, backed through the crosswalk, backed through the bike path into the moving traffic going north on Eighth Avenue, as careening police vehicles blared, out of the way, out of the way. Unscratched and unscathed, obviously, but what is it about backing up? Why should backing up be that much harder than going ahead? Hard not to want to make meaning of that question, even as I can say that the Prius has a strange blind spots, and my neck is stiffer than it should be, and I'm probably too near-sighted to drive anyway, even with contact lenses.

So here we are, 130 miles south of the city. We've been to the dog beach; we've been to the WaWa, the hardware store, the produce stand. The weather is muggy summer, though the atmosphere is much more tranquil. All is well, though my father keeps referring to Ned as a "she" and/or a "good girl." Maybe you can tell me why this is driving me insane.

These pictures, by the way, are from Ned's first ocean swim.

What Up?

In the last few days I've found myself looking up, and seeing things atop buildings I thought I'd known for years. How could I have walked by the apartment building on West 17th Street and not noticed the intricate cornice above the sixth floor, or the dry cleaners on West 15th and not seen it was part of a 19th century townhouse? It occurred to me that New York City isn't made for that kind of gazing. Look up, and instantly you're a vulnerable creature. Your upper lip lifts; you squint, and you lose--at least to the person walking toward you--all authority and sophistication. You are totally Green Acres, and by that I don't mean Eva Gabor. So you walk on, missing a lot: the horse head jutting out of the building, the modernist addition atop the townhouse. But you're not falling into the open basement door on the sidewalk. You're not exasperating the man striding with fervor and purpose behind you. You're impersonating someone who knows who he is, who knows where he's going, while above you a completely different city is just fine with keeping its charms to itself.

Ned Takes a Walk

On Wednesday, I got the idea to take Ned for a walk, a longer walk than usual, out to the Hudson River Park. The two of us were having a fine time. Walking past Buddakan, Western Beef, the loading docks, the strangely pleasing combination carwash-gas station beneath the High Line: my usual walk felt much different to me, as if I were experiencing it all with sharper scent glands, much, much closer to pavement.

I hadn't quite realized how far the park was till we crossed the West Side Highway. Ned saw the Hudson--the living, raw-smelling Hudson--and immediately thrust his head between the railing: he wanted to go in! The blood memory of his ancestors wanted him to go in! So with a "no, no, no," I dragged him to a benign-looking bench, just beside the pier with the playground. There he could watch and smell the river from a little distance. He could watch the people go by, and they'd be close enough to him to notice him, which appears to be very important to him.

Then up comes a woman--how to describe the woman? Pamela Anderson Lee, but much younger, but that's probably not so fair to Pamela Anderson Lee. She's in a short, sheer dress; she's walking bare foot, high heels in each hand. She seems both prostitute or Fashion Week victim--or maybe both. Maybe it's possible to be both. She shrieks, Golden Retriever! Golden Retriever! She slams beside me, proceeds to pull out her phone to show me a picture of her Golden Retriever back home, but her phone battery's dead. Damn it! she says, and as she leans into me, over me, Ned's taken one of her high shoes and gnaws the heel. The woman seems to think this is both a scream and the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she demands I take a picture of her and Ned to commemorate the moment. Take it! she cries. Take it! By this time it has occurred to me that she's utterly cracked-out. I've never seen a human so high in my life, and I don't mean a good high. She can hardly stay in her skin so she wants someone else's skin. It would be terrible to be in that state, in the city, even in the utterly cleaned up and civilized park. And I don't yet think that she's trouble, even as she's leaning over me. My gut impulse is to be tranquil against that kind of energy, maybe as a way to calm the person down, maybe as a way to calm myself down. She's grabbing his collar onto his collar now, and suddenly it appears that she's trying to take off his collar, and that's it, that's enough. "We're moving on," I say, firm, but as casually as I can. "I'm sorry I freaked you out," she replies. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And it's all one-part funny and also just horribly, desperately sad. And who knows what's next for the cracked-out young woman, who probably ended up stepping on a nail or piece of broken glass, and ended up in an emergency room on the other side of the city.

So Ned and go on, unscathed--or disaster averted. Or a little something of both. And it doesn't so much matter that I'm yelled at and threatened with a fifty dollar ticket for allowing Ned play on the edge of the lawn with a ten-month- old puppy--there must be a private hell reserved for those who take pleasure in preventing puppies from chewing on one another. But we go on meeting other dogs, other dogs' humans on the streets of the West Village, and bond over our stories of the assholes guarding the park. And at once it occurs to me that you're not really living in New York if you don't have a dog with you. You could so safely glide above it, like those riding on the upper tier of the tour buses looking down at it all with mild curiosity from their seats. And it occurred to me that that was exactly how I'd been living in Manhattan for all those dogless years.


Ned and High Heel in Question

Bear in Heaven

Dragging away from the high road
We should find a flock of birds big enough
to pull us up from the long road
Come on. Come with us....

I've been listening to Bear in Heaven's "Lovesick Teenagers" over and over for the past few days, so I think that means it's telling me it wants to find a home here. Don't be put off by the title; I'm not even sure the song is exactly about teenagers, as it is about endurance and transmutation, but it's the music that interests me most--don't ask me why I'm a writer. Starved grandeur. I was going to say it gets me every time, but it's not like that sound comes along every day.

For some reason, Pitchfork TV appears to be misbehaving in the embed department, so a link might just have to suffice.

I've also been meaning to put a link to three pieces of mine--"The White Deer," "Love Story," and "Mothers in the Trees," in the new issue of Sweet. The first is from the new memoir; the second two are from Unbuilt Projects. The three all turn around a mother, or a lost mother, and the third even features its own bear in heaven.

Home Invasion

We woke up at 6:30 this morning to head over to the Brooklyn Book Festival, where Mark was to read with Tracy K. Smith and Terrance Hayes at ten. We'd been up for a half hour (I'd already taken my shower) when Mark couldn't find his laptop. I looked for my laptop, and--didn't I leave it out on the coffee table last night? Mark's laptop gone, my laptop gone. And all at once the story plays out: kitchen window open, dirty shoe print on the windowsill, and the battered fire escape, formerly useless device marring the front of the building, suddenly seems sinister. And within a half hour five police officers are crowding our one-bedroom apartment, fingerprinting us (a messier, more extended procedure than you'd think), dusting the window frame and refrigerator for fingerprints. The cops were all very kind and funny, and their hour-and-a-half in the apartment was not without its comic moments: Ned nipping at one of the officers trousers, Ned carrying off the fingerprinting brush, chewing it, mauling it. But I haven't been able to shake off the words of one of the detectives, whose voice took on a more serious tone just as he was getting ready to leave --it was very lucky you all slept through it, because it would have been a different situation if one of you had woken up. And I wasn't thinking then about my lost music library, which I'd never bothered to back up, or the photos and letters, or any of the drafts I hadn't backed up this summer, and thought of a stranger creeping within two feet of the bedroom, while the three of us--Mark on the left side, me on the right, Ned in the middle--slept peaceably, as if danger were very far.

Sense and Sensibility

In the past few weeks, I've been posting a song a day on my Facebook page as a kind of emotional autobiography. I'm not talking about lyrical content; I'm thinking more along the lines of atmosphere or sonic texture. When you try something like this, it's inevitable that you start to see a sensibility taking shape. The songs of the past week, which I've posted below, come from several different genres. (Or more accurately, they merge genres.) They're all interested in harmonic quirkiness, unexpected chordal movement, disruption of pattern. They want to be distinctive. They like the orchestral sweep. But they also appreciate subtlety, quiet, solemnity, wit--those are very important. And they're not afraid of a little drama, which is all we'll say about that.

My friend, Alice, on the other hand, hears something different about these songs: they're all about the rhythm to her. A heartbeat, something propulsive. She might correct me, but I think she said she hears a train running through them. Which leads me to wonder: are we even able to apprehend what we love and long for?

Earlier this week I met my first NYU workshop of the semester. In the early minutes of the class I asked my students what kind of artist would they be if they couldn't be writers. We went around the room. Someone said, stand up comic. Someone said, Taiwanese pop star. Someone said, chef. Someone said, metal worker. When we were done, I think we were delighted by the variety of answers in that room. Many of us were smiling. And then I said, now what can you take from your love of that thing to your work?







Dirty Projectors, "Temecula Sunrise" (Live)
Click

Storm Story 2 (August to August)

My big announcement is that I finished the first draft of my new memoir on Tuesday. It seemed oddly right that I should finished it given that the book wants, in part, to be about a year of mourning, August to August. On a gut level I must have known that the book would have been another book if it had extended into September and beyond. It's odd that all the patterns, connections that have pushed the book along have all but vanished in the last few days. Maybe that's because I'm no longer looking for them, or maybe that's because I'm no longer sending out the brain waves that help to make those patterns happen. Maybe it's a relief to back to the old day in, day out, where each and every thing doesn't necessarily mean.

So I've literally given myself a personal vacation in the last two days. Well, not quite a full vacation; I just turned in the copy edits of The Burning House, which I walked to the post office late this afternoon. But other than that? A day trip to Asbury Park on Wednesday, a day trip to Coney Island yesterday. The first time I'd been in the ocean, I'm startled to admit, all summer! These trips were taken when it seemed the coast was on the verge of being scoured by the hurricane. I guess I shouldn't speak too soon (I'm looking at live footage of a stirred-up Nantucket Harbor as I write this), but there was something compelling about taking in two different places that looked like they were about to be hit. Not ruined, nothing so drastic as that, but rearranged some. Did we feel more tenderness than usual toward the light on the buildings, the men slouching in the beach chairs? Did the ocean feel more extraordinary? Maybe. I guess that's just an ancient story.

(Asbury Park above, Coney Island below)